Abstract:
Language is a system of verbal elements that makes communication of meaningspossible in the manners the users intend by employing certain linguistic deviceswhich are partly language-specific. Once communicating cross-linguistically, thereis always a risk of negative transfer of techniques or processes from the firstlanguage (L1) to the foreign language (L2). The current study investigates the“emphasis” issue and how it is encoded and performed as a speech act in Persianand English. The investigation, based on a descriptive method, begins by verifyingoverstated and understated utterances in English and Persian individually and thenproceeds to evaluate the 2 bodies of data against each other. As observed in the caseof Iranian learners of English, the process of emphasizing through phonologicaldevices is heavily transferred. English mainly applies lexicalization, whereasvocalization is the preferred process in Persian. The tenets of this study may be ofinsight for theories of SLA. They also promise to ease English learning tasks byreducing students' negative transfer from their mother tongue.
Machine summary:
Vocalization: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Emphasis in English and Persian Ahmad Reza Eslami¹ & Mohammad Javad Rezai² ¹Yazd University, eslami.
Keywords: Linguistic Differences; Language Transfer; Emphasis; Phonological Devices; Lexicalization 1.
g. , Hayati, 1998; Jun, 2005; Sadat-Tehrani, 2009; Soltani, 2007), the present article undertakes a contrastive task of the type to bring into focus a very important distinction between English and Persian as how they utter expressions that encode emphasis either as overstatement or understatement.
2. Statement of the Problem Due to the lack or dearth of research in the literature which, in turn, accounts for a rather good number of so-called well trained but indeed insightfully poor English teachers, great hosts of English learners at nearly all levels of language education keep making mistakes with utterances of emphasis.
This cross-linguistic study which is descriptive in nature may be taken as significant because by virtue of the general belief that comparison is an effective method of gaining knowledge (Gentner & Namy, 1999; Sims & Colunga, 2010), comparisons and contrasts made on the purpose of describing two languages vs.
First, one hears and reads lexicalized versions more frequently than vocalized ones, which means English speakers have a preference for depending on words rather than voice to utter things emphatically.
Obviously, because language is a matter of words, structures, and sounds, the devices of emphasis may be considered within semantic, syntactic, and phonological scopes.