Archaism: From An Aesthetic Technique to A Linguistics Process

Archaism: From An Aesthetic Technique to A Linguistics Process

a lecture by

Azita Taleghani
Associate Professor, Persian Language, Literature and Linguistics
Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations

Abstract
Poetry is one of the manifestation of literary language and it is created by foregrounding through deviation and extra regularities (parallelism). Foregrounding is an unusual use of the language and it changes the automatic language into the literary language. There are 8 different forms of foregrounding in the language. This presentation focuses on one form of foregrounding called Archaism. Archaism defines as using archaic expressions in modern prose and poetry. In this presentation, I will discuss the poetic and linguistics functions of Archaism. By bringing evidence from the poems of Modern poets like Nima Yushij, Mehdi Akhavan Sales, Ahmad Shamlu, and Mohammad Reza Shafii Kadkani I show that archaism is not just an aesthetic technique that poets usually use to change an automatic language into a poetic language. Archaism has a great linguistics impact. In other words, by using archaism poets unconsciously make new words, revive the old word formation’s processes, and increase the lexicon of the language.

Azita H. Taleghani has a Ph.D. degree in linguistics from the University of Arizona. Her research has primarily focused on syntax and morphology of Persian, second-language pedagogy, Linguistics approaches in Modern Persian literature and Web-based language pedagogy. She has published a monograph on ‘Modality, Aspect and Negation in Persian’ in 2008 and her recent manuscript on “Grammar of Persian Simple Verbs for Second Language Learners” is under review for the publication. She has several refereed articles. Her most recent article is “Foregrounding and its role in Persian Modern Poetry”. In addition to teaching Persian language, Modern Persian literature, and linguistics at the University of Toronto, she is the Undergraduate Coordinator of Languages (Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, Spanish and Urdu).