Semantic Prosody in Bilingual English-Persian Dictionaries
Paper ID : 1097-ICIL
Authors:
Afsane Moeeni *1, Shahram Modarres Khiyabani2, Mohammad Karimi Behbahani3
1NO.:37, Zare' st., Tehranvilla st., Sattarkhan st., Tehran, Iran
2Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch Deputy Head of Research & Faculty Member of the English Language Department
3Karaj Islamic Azad University , Faculty of Literature and Foreign Languages, Department of English
Abstract:
The present study tries to put forward a review of the nature of the semantic prosody in Persian language and English translated texts to Persian through examining English words with confirmed semantic prosodies in bilingual English- Persian dictionaries with an analytic viewpoint. Subsequently, the examination of the concept of Semantic Prosody is studied in translation progress from English to Persian and tries to present a reliable and an appropriate answer to this specific ambiguity whether the very concept of semantic prosody is examined in bilingual English-Persian dictionaries. The most frequent English lexical items that were found to have particular semantic prosodies in previous research and their counterparts in Persian were examined in a parallel corpus (containing more than one million sentences) and then they were probed in nine most reliable bilingual English-Persian dictionaries (five hard copies and four softcopies). The main part of the findings of the present study is consistent with findings reported by earlier ones that the Persian language manifests semantic prosody as the English language does. However, the findings revealed that the bilingual English-Persian dictionaries suffer two deficiencies in terms of semantic prosody. First they don’t present a categorized and distinctly labeled entry to facilitate the identification of Persian equivalents in terms of negative, positive or neutral semantic prosody, second, there are words (among the analyzed words) that lack corresponding Persian equivalent on the basis of semantic prosody. This study is a descriptive-analytic corpus-based one.
Keywords:
semantic prosody, corpus linguistics, Mizan parallel corpus, English-Persian dictinary
Status : Paper Accepted
10th International Iranian Conference on Linguistics
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