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In recent decades, processing relative clauses (RCs) and studying their complexity in different languages had an important role in linguistic and psycholinguistic researches. This study is to compare the complexity of two types of Persian RCs: Subject-Subject (SS) type and Subject-Object (SO) type. This complexity is assessed on the psychological criterion of the preschool children’s understanding of the sentences in which these types of RCs are used. 96 Persian native children in three different age ranges of 3-4, 4-5, and 5-6 (each range 32 children) took part in this study. They were presented by the fore-mentioned types of sentences in two different forms of declarative and interrogative sentences, in different ways of showing pictures and realties, and also asking them to follow the order. Then their understanding of these sentences was tested. The results showed that SO type RCs, both in declarative and interrogative forms, were clearly more complex than SS type RCs.        

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One of the language functions is making communication among thoughts and beliefs. This language function is regarded as a part of social and communicative events as writing of editorials. Texts of editorials, not only through a chain of sentences but also through a hierarchical structure are organized.This structure is divided into units, called "episode", which has an integrated nature either structurally or semantically, and its borders are verbally clear. As episodes are assumed as discourse semantic units, we must define them in according to semantic terms such as propositions. The problem and goal of this study is to recognize propositional levels in the west´s editorials texts on Iran´s nuclear activity. On this basis, by using Van Dijk's episodic model (1981) and analytical method, we tried to analyze one sample of Independent editorial about the nuclear activity of Iran, published in Britain, to answer this question; "how we can describe the organizing process of editorials in an integrated model of propositions". This study shows that general macropropositions are manifested in the first thematic sentences and provide a summary of the text, which is America's policy toward the nuclear activity of Iran. Subtheme of the text, which is about the opinions and reactions of powerful governments and also that of Iran toward this policy, is presented in the paragraphs and the general structure of the text, respectively. 

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This study examines the relation between the level of informants' interlanguage and the frequency of two types of errors: intralinguals and interlinguals. A cognitive- contrastive approach has been suggested as an eclectic model to analyze the frequency of errors of Persian-speaking students in using Spanish verb-governed prepositions. This study is considered as an applied study based on research objectives, and a correlation from the point of view of method. The population is from Alame Tabatabaie University undergraduate Spanish students. First 75 students were selected according to the cluster sampling method. Then 67 of students were reselected and divided into the following three levels of interlanguage: basic, intermediate, and advanced. The level of interlanguage was determined by the students' answers to the questionnaire. Using descriptive statistics, the study shows that the frequency of intralingual errors has a positive correlation with the level of the interlanguage, and the frequency of interlingual errors has a negative correlation with the level of interlanguage.    

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Hedging is a rhetorical strategy which speaker employs for lack of a full commitment either to the full category membership of a term or expression (content mitigation), or to the intended illocutionary force of the utterance (force mitigation). Hedging must be considered as an intentional action. The speaker chooses a linguistic device over the propositional content of the message which will affect the interpretation of the utterance; either modifies the content of the utterance or its force. Although hedges have no certain lexical meaning; they have powerful functional and pragmatic meaning. This research has been done by means of descriptive-analytical method with purpose of definition, introducing of applications of hedges based on Fraser(2009) , and finally a case study of hedges  in political discourse of  press conferences  of president Ahmadinejad within the framework of critical discourse analysis .The results show that the president (Ahmadinejad) has used hedging as a political language strategy to express vagueness and evasion which are one of the skillfully policies in political speech. He applied passive voice and impersonal pronouns more than other kinds of hedges.

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The process of language change is an inseparable feature of the inherent nature of every language. This change is so slow and delicate that it will be tangible for the native speakers only after a long time and in comparison with the past. A diachronic outlook of the language is especially beneficial here. The present research seeks to examine the transition process of (negative or positive) semantic prosody of some presently neutral Persian verb compounds into connotation. To this end, different researches on semantic prosody, connotation and their transformation in different languages and especially in English are reviewed and the same trend is traced in some verb compounds in Persian. Two corpora from two different historical periods (12th century and modern Persian) of language data were compiled and the semantic prosody of seven verb compound was established in the two. The results show that the semantic prosody of some of these compounds have changed from positive to negative over time and this negative semantic prosody in some of the compounds especially mojeb shodan (cause) is changing to negative connotation.

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This research aims at analyzing the narrator type and the modality governing his point of view in the short story "Frankness and Decisiveness" (1349) by Bahram Sadeghi". We have used Simpson's model (1993) in which narrative and point of view are studied utilizing a linguistic framework. The goal of this paper is to determine the type of narrator (first, second or third person) and modality of the story (positive, negative, neutral). We have assumed that the narrator is third person and modality is neutral. The data are analyzed according to categories and analytic instruments introduced by the theory; Therefore, the method of this research is descriptive-analytic. Modality in linguistics concerns the writer's view on the truth of a proposition stated in a sentence. Findings of this study show that the narrator is type B (third person) who willingly enters the characters' mind and reports their intentions and thoughts to the reader. Analyzing the modal devices in every sentence shows that the narrator uses verbs and adverbs of request, sentences stating opinions, generic sentences, imperative verbs and evaluative adjectives and adverbs all of which denote positive modality. To show the procedure which ends in a misunderstanding and also for evaluating the situation, the writer makes use of negative modality devices through which the most important elements are cognitive verbs.

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 Importing the pragmatic theories of ‘politeness’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987) and ‘impoliteness’ (Culpeper, 1996) into the domain of literary studies, this article intends to investigate politeness and impoliteness strategies used  in ten highly acknowledged Persian youngsters’ novels published from 2002 to 2012. For a novel to be included in the samples it should not be translation; most of its events should be narrated through dialogues; and that it should have won the majority of prizes for youngsters’ literature. This article addresses two central research questions: (1) How is the characters’ uses of politeness and impoliteness strategies in peer-group and non-peer-group vary? (2) In general, which strategies (politeness strategies or impoliteness strategies) are more frequently used by characters in Persian-speaking Youngsters’ Novels? The results, came by Chi-Square test, demonstrate that the characters in Persian youngsters’ novels are more inclined to using impolite strategies in peer-group interactions compared to non-peer-group interactions and that characters, in general, make more use of politeness strategies than impoliteness strategies.  

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Animations, one of the virtues of digital world, subjectively demonstrates anthropomorphic representations of fantasy worlds in which human and non-human identities are constantly being revalued. In this milieu, animators are heirs to aesthetic resources functioning a mediating force to re-conceptualize and reorganize the world’s spatial coordinates. This paper probes the nature of creeping ideologies about consumerism, globalized world and denigrated non-American local cultures propagated in popular, animated Hollywood film Fantastic Mr. Fox through a multimodal analysis. Multimodality, an interdisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary communication and representation, justifiably claims that there are intricate processes of meaning-making achieved not only through language but also through a variety of modes, including image, gaze, gesture, movement, music, speech and sound–effect, that simultaneously and in various degrees contribute to the gestation of semiotic landscape. Applying a multimodal approach, we try to answer these questions: In what ways is multimodality a repertoire for scaffolding cultural identity? How can multimodal representations help immerse interpreters in the life-worlds of fictional characters? What is the best way to study processes of remediation as they bear on issues of multimodality? The significance of current study is emphasized by the formation of an increasingly intimate association between children, consumer culture, and lucre-oriented media in the USA, as well as the increasingly dire information emerging about disparaged local traditions. This analysis grossly represents the dual, alienating and often conflicting messages that commercial film provides for its young audiences about promised American utopia and their vociferously alleged panacea for the audiences’ desperate situation.
 

 
 

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One of the main reasons of building Qadamgāhs (literally meaning the place of foot or the place of stepping) was the dreams a believer had of a saint. There are a large number of such buildings in Iran. In some cases, the dreams are inscribed on tablets in order to preserve the dream for future generations. This paper introduces five lustre ceramic tablets, which contain records of such dreams. The texts of two of them have been preserved completely, and significantly show astonishing similarities. The first is dated back to 1312 AD and belongs to Qadamgāh of Mehrīqābād. Its text mentions that Fakhr al-Din Hasan Tabari saw Imam Ali in a dream ordering him to build a shrine. According to the text of the second tile in Qadamgāh-i Khezr in the village of Yazdelan in 1607, someone saw Khezr in a dream who orders to reconstruct a ruined domed building. This article examines the differences and similarities between these two tablets from the Ilkhanid and Safavid periods, and analyzes them in detail. It can be said that these two tablets have a common content that have been written with the aim of documenting the reconstruction of a religious building borrowing the Iranian and Shi'at themes. These two examples show that the tradition of recording dreams on lustre tiles was not only prevalent at the glorious era of lustre production, but also extended to three centuries later.
Introduction
“Qadamgāh” refers to some places of pilgrimage in the Islamic world where a Prophet, Imam or saint has passed or has been seen in a dream. Dreaming has been one of the main reasons for building Qadamgāhs, in that, it was built when someone saw one of the saints in a dream and based on the saint’s order or his own decision, he called that place a Qadamgāh. This phenomenon, which sometimes led to the establishment of a building, has been common among Shi'ats. In some cases, commemorative tablets made of stones or tiles were used to record the dreams. Five lustre tiles, which belong to the Qadamgāhi buildings, have been identified in the region of Kashan, that contain a record of a dream. Three of them, which bear the name of a Qadamgāh, called Darb-e Mehriqābād, were produced in the fourteenth century. Although the tradition of writing on lustre tiles has continued until the Safavid period, no example containing a dream is known except for an unpublished tile from Qadamgāh-e Khezr in Yazdelan village. This tile, which dates back to 1015 AH/1607 AD, is full of symbolic and mythical signs. Interestingly, the Mehriqābād tiles dates back to 711 AH/1312 AD, and the Yazdelan tile have significant similarities with them in terms of form and content.
Research Background
The major research on lustre tiles has been done by Oliver Watson (1975, 1985). However, no research has been done on the Qadamgāhi lustre tiles, except for two papers written by Chahryar Adle about the tiles of Mehriqābād (Adle, 1972, 1982). Nonetheless, he has made some mistakes in reading the text and also did not notice the fifty-year difference in the date of these tiles. In addition, he was unable to identify the exact building of this Qadamgāh.
Discussion
There is a pair of circular lustre tiles in the Musée national de céramique de Sèvres, the text of which mentions the construction of a Qadamgāh in Kashan. The text of the tiles tells us that a person named Sayyed Fakhr al-Din Hassan Tabari finds himself in a dream in the middle of a crowd in the garden of Amir in Kashan. There, he sees Imam ‘Ali who tells him to construct a building in that place so that whoever wants to visit him can come to that position. Three centuries later, a lustre tile was installed in the Khezr Qadamgāh of Yazdelan, which narrates a dream that led to the construction of the building. According to its text, a person saw Khezr in a dream, who asked him to repair a domed building.
One of the similar and important elements in both dreams is their connection to the garden. In fact, the holy sites in question are located in the garden that was famous at that time. The timing of both dreams is interesting in its own way. The dream of Mehriqābād coincides with Eid al-Fitr and the dream of Yazdelan coincides with Nowruz. In fact, the dreamers have been influenced by the religious festivals at both times, which belong to a mythical and ritual time. Another common feature of both texts is the effort to document the dream, which mentions the exact characteristics of the place and time of the dream.
Conclusion
During the Ilkhanid period, as there was more religious freedom for Shi'ats, the opportunity to express and document such Shi'at dreams became more prominent. On the other hand, with the rise of the Safavids and the prevalent freedom for the Shi'ats, the emergence of Shi'at beliefs developed unprecedentedly. Although the two lustre tiles examined in this paper were made over a period of three centuries, they are certain significant similarities in their content. The main theme, the type of time and place, the sacred personality, the attention to documentation and the influence of Iranian culture in both examples are comparable. In fact, they both express an identical concern: the reconstruction of a religious building the location of which has sacred memories. Interestingly, in the inscriptions of both buildings discussed in this article, there are signs of pre-Islamic beliefs of the people of the region. However, this is far from the common traditions of Islam and is based mostly on popular beliefs.
References
Adle, Ch. (1972). Un disque de fondation en céramique (Kâšân, 711/1312), Journal Asiatique, CCLX (3‒4), 277‒297.
Adle, Ch. (1982). Un diptique de foundation en ceramique lustrée, Kašan 711/1312, In: idem, ed., Art et société dans le monde iranien, (pp. 199-218). Paris: Institut Français d’Iranologie.
Watson, O. (1975b). Persian lusterware, from the 14^th to the 19th centuries. Le Monde Iranien et l'Islam: Sociétés et Cultures, 3, 63-80.

Watson, O. (1985). Persian lusterware. Faber and Faber.

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Autism spectrum disorder has always been associated with pragmatic language disorder. The present study aims to investigate the effect of audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises on improving (non)verbal communication skills in children with autism. It is a clinical trial with a pretest-posttest design. Subjects were selected by convenience sampling method which included 19 children aged 7 to 9 years old with autism spectrum disorder (level 1: requiring support). They received an intervention program organized in 18 individual sessions of 45 to 60 minutes. The findings of the study revealed that utilized audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improved pragmatic level in children with autism spectrum disorder. In other words, it had a positive effect (p< 0.05) on the subscales of pragmatic skills in the Bishop Communication Checklist Questionnaire (1998). According to the results, it was shown that audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improved (non)verbal communication skills in children with autism.
 
1. Introduction
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which one of the most important symptoms is deficits in social communication and interaction. Children with ASD have a wide range of communication, social, and speech needs and require special behavioral and educational programs. Since communication problems have always been considered as a core feature of autistic children, interventions with the increase of language use and the reduction of communication and language problems are necessary.
Social stories that are used as an intervention are short stories written in conformance with the guidelines provided by Gray (1991). By reading, seeing and hearing them, the child prepares in his/her mind to face different situations and to show appropriate answers and reactions based on the relevant situation. According to the speech therapists, the lack of localized stories and along with them the pragmatic exercises for children with ASD were strongly felt since comprehensive exercises in Persian have not been designed yet for these children. Attempts are made to help the language development of children with disabilities (level 1) by using researcher-made tools that include social short stories and pragmatic exercises to increase their language abilities. The focus of the designed stories has been on improving communication skills in different situations as well as daily routines. In the present study, we seek to answer the following questions:
1. Do the audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises improve pragmatic skills in children with level 1 autism (requiring support)?
2. Which of the subscales related to the cognitive-functional part of the children’s communication checklist of Kazemi et al. (2005) are affected by teaching the audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises?
 
2. Literature Review
Studies have found that verbal and non-verbal forms of communication are impaired in these children, and even if the linguistic structure ability left unimpaired, the social and communicative use is impaired. As a case in point, Surian et al. (1996) stated that these children ignore the principle of quantity in conversation, and the Gricean maxim violations made their speech irrelevant and meaningless.
Social stories were first developed by Carol Gray (1991) to assist individuals with autism spectrum disorders to develop greater social understanding. In these stories, by providing information about the conditions that have created difficulties for the child with ASD and explaining those conditions to him/her, we can help them to improve their mastery of the situation, with having role models and behavioral examples.
Feinberg (2001, cited in Quirmbach et al., 2008) has studied the effectiveness of social stories among 34 children with ASD, aged between eight to thirteen. In this study, pre-test and post-test methods were used to evaluate the effectiveness. The results of this study show that social stories have a positive effect on the initiation and establishment of communication between children with ASD and their peers.
In Iran, research has been conducted to teach social skills to children with autism through social stories. Tutuni (2011) compared and observed the performance of children with autism disorders structure domain (speech, syntax, semantics) and pragmatics (coherence, inappropriate initiation, stereotyped language, using context and conversational context) with the performance of normal Persian-speaking children. The performance of children with ASD is significantly different from the normal children. Children with autism have poorer performance in terms of pragmatics comparing to the linguistic structure. In addition , Golzari and Hemmati (2015) investigated the effect of social story intervention on improving the social skills of male students with autism. The results showed that the mean scores of social skills and its subscales (ability to understand the emotions and views of others, ability to start interacting with others, and ability to maintain interaction with others) in the experimental group increased significantly and their findings indicate the effect of social stories intervention on improving the skills.
Pragmatic skills — as the key components of social interaction — require the proper development of mind theory. The pragmatic aspects of language and how to learn them are closely related to children's learning of mind theory, especially their mental understanding of intentions and other mental states (Tager-Flusberg, 2000). The theory that can explain the simultaneous occurrence of deficit in socialization, language, and imagination in children with autism is called the theory of mind (Wing & Gould, 1979). Therefore, the inability to develop the theory of mind has been considered as an explanation for the problems of children with autism in social interactions (Baron-Cohen & Weelwright, 2003). It is because of this lack of mental capacity that these children talk about subjects aimlessly, failing to take turns in conversation and maintaining the subject of conversation. They have difficulty in understanding their own and others' mental states and cannot use their communication skills according to the situation.
As a result, in the present study, according to the theory of mind, in designing audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises, perspective sentences have been used to teach the children that the views of others are different from their own views and each behavior causes various feelings in different people. And this is the attention to the theory of mind approach that has been considered in stories and pragmatic exercises.
 
3. Methodology
The statistical population of the present study was all children with ASD in Shahrekord, Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari Province. The number of final samples (convenient sampling method) was 19 children aged 7 to 9 years who were diagnosed by speech therapists and were selected from three speech therapy centers in Shahrekord in the summer and autumn of 1398. During 18 sessions of 45 to 60 minutes for each subject, which lasted for a maximum period of five months in total, their language and communication performance were examined.
 In this study, three tools were used, the first two, namely audio-visual social stories and pragmatic exercises as researcher-made tools, and the third one, which is a checklist of children's communication, were used to evaluate the performance of children with disabilities in pre-test and post-test.
Fifteen short audio-visual social stories were prepared, edited, and localized using the principles of social storytelling by Gray (1998). The pragmatic exercises are the second tool with a total of 42 exercises. In each exercise, by defining the objectives of the research, the question was read by the person or by the speech therapist. Then, with the help of the speech therapist the child was allowed to present his/her answer. This questionnaire Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) was initially designed by Bishop (1998) and standardized by Kazemi et al. (2005) for children aged six to eleven years. Its validity and reliability were assessed and an appropriate Persian version of the questionnaire was prepared. This version includes 70 questions with 9 subscales among which 5 subscales are related to pragmatics. To name just a few, we can mention inappropriate initiation, coherence, stereotyped language, use of situational context, and appropriate communication as pragmatic subscales.

 4. Results
The collected data were analyzed using statistical methods using SPSS 19 statistical software. The statistical methods used in the research include the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to examine the natural distribution of data and the dependent t-test to show the difference between the means before and after the intervention. The performance of children with disabilities in pre‑test and post-test was evaluated. The data show that the mean performance of children in a total of 5 subscales related to the pragmatics section of the Bishop communication questionnaire is 114.8 in the pre-test and 120.7 in the post-test and the t-value with 18 degrees of freedom is significant at the level of p <0.05. The mean and standard deviation of the scores of all five subtests from the Bishop communication checklist has increased in the post-test stage compared to the pre-test stage. In other words, this difference was due to the application of the independent variable. In general, analytical statistics indicate a significant difference between pre-test and post-test. The results of the five subscales are shown in the table below:
 

group	Frequency	Mean	t	freedom	significance level
Pre-test	19	114/8	-8/72	18	*0/000
post-test	19	120/7

*p<./.5
 
5. Discussion
The underlying theory of social stories goes back to a defect in the theory of mind, and the purpose of the social story is to improve the social cognition of people with autism and facilitate the creation of a theory of mind by describing specific social conditions of which the person is unaware of. Due to the functional problems of children with ASD and its adverse effect on their social skills, by supporting the functional development of language in a child, it is possible to help develop his/her own language and communication skills. The results from these analyses show that visual and auditory social stories and applied cognitive exercises were effective in improving the verbal and non-verbal communication skills of children with autism, and thus the research hypothesis was confirmed because the difference is statistically significant. These findings are consistent with the findings of Feinberg (2001) and Andre (2004) who acknowledged that social storytelling had a positive effect on the initiation of speech and communication between children with autism and their peers. The results of the study are also in agreement with the studies conducted in Iran, including Bahmanzadegan Jahromi et al. (2008), Golzari and Hemmati (2015), who approved that teaching social skills through social stories led to the reduction of deficit in non‑verbal behaviors, deficit in the maintenance of relationships with others. On the other hand, these stories improved the social behaviors of the children considering the environment and others.
The limitations of the study include the absence of some children during the intervention due to the cost of speech therapy sessions, lack of proper cooperation of government-sponsored centers with the researchers in the field, and lack of cooperation from parents and their families in completing questionnaires and hypersensitivity of their parents in the educational process of their children. In general, due to such limitations, it is suggested that more awareness and information be provided to the families of these children.