English-Persian Word Formation with an Eye on Culture and Thought Effects

Journal of Studies in Learning and Teaching English

شناسنامه علمی شماره، دوره 1، شماره 1، شهریور 2012   

نویسندگان

Ebrahim Abedi¹؛ Lotfollah Yarmohamadi¹؛ Naser Rashidi^{* 2}

¹Shiraz Azad University

²Shiraz University

چکیده

This research aims to introduce culture and thought -within Whorfian
hypothesis-of the target language to EFL learners and helps them get a deeper
idea over the root and reference of words and thereby keep them longer in
memory. To test the hypothesis Orwell’s
Animal Farm
was chosen along with
two translations in Persian as well as a Persian short story titled
Ahu-ye Kuhi
.
Required data were extracted from the aforesaid books with no sampling
procedure applied but the whole books were taken into consideration. The
researchers made use of syntactic discussions like grammatical gender in
addition to semantic domains like colors, planets, flowers, religion, and
others in a contrastive way. Any word signaling one of these domains was
highlighted and analyzed through examples. The domains revealed a high rate
of effect on the formation of words both in English and Persian with basic
changes in between. It was concluded that the roles of thought and cultural
domains on the vocabulary systems of the two languages are effective and
crucially important particularly in that EFL learners get familiar with
the culture and thinking styles of the target language which paves the
way for learning the language easier.

کلیدواژه‌ها

culture؛ thought؛ word formation؛ semantic domain