Fictional uncertainty is a complex technique that utilizes literary devices such as changing points of view, multiple themes, and fluid characterization. Fictional uncertainty enables an author to create a layered narrative based upon multiple perspectives and a deep look into the characters' individual personalities and inner lives. Every work of fiction involves some amount of uncertainty, but in modern Iranian literature there was a distinct transition in the late twentieth century from greater realism to greater uncertainty. Indeed, the mode of fictional uncertainty is central to Iranian authors' modernist project, focused as it is on the psychological aspects of the charterers' lives and narrative aesthetics. Fiction prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution usually focused on sociological matters, but post-revolution modernist fiction has been distinguished by emphasis on the deeper realities of characters' individual lives. Fictional uncertainty is the most significant literary technique that authors have used to portray the complexity of Iranians' post-revolutionary experiences. It has provided a tool for a number of Iranian writers to oppose the dominant social, cultural, historical, and religious certainties of post-revolutionary Iranian society. Shahriar Mandanipour, one of the greatest users of this technique, has extended the boundaries of Persian fiction through his experimental fiction. Although Mandanipour does count some traditional realist fictions among his works, his efforts in applying fictional uncertainty make him unique and exemplary. Under the influence of Russian Formalism, Mandanipour mostly uses his content as a pretext for formalist fictional experiments. Mandanipour's focus on "literariness" is the basis of his interest in the technique of fictional uncertainty and his understanding of the essentiality of "form" in fictional works. Fictional uncertainty is not always guided by one particular ideology or discourse, but rather by the ways in which devices such as changing points of view, multiple themes, fluid characters, and unstable settings function in the text. In the case of post-revolutionary Persian literature, fictional uncertainty has also provided authors a way to investigate and recreate the complex dynamics of revolutionary and post-revolutionary life, which is to some extent ultimately related to ideology and discourse. A close reading of Mandanipour's short stories and novels will show that his application of fictional uncertainty is related to the Bakhtinian concepts of "polyphony, dialogue, unfinalizability" and becoming, which are embodied in the plots, characterizations, and points of view in his works. Using these fictional devices, Mandanipour portrays an atomized Iran full of violence, despair, fear, infidelity, revenge, and loneliness. However, his works go far beyond Iran as a historical nation-state and discuss a number of universal subjects like love, death, loneliness, and revenge by application of the technique of fictional uncertainty.

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Coral reef ecosystems are in rapid decline due to global and local anthropogenic factors. Being among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, a loss will decrease species diversity, and remove food source for people along the coast. The coral together with its symbionts (i.e. Symbiodinium, bacteria, and other microorganisms) is called the ‘coral holobiont’. The coral host offers its associated symbionts suitable habitats and nutrients, while Symbiodinium and coral-associated bacteria provide the host with photosynthates and vital nutrients. Association of corals with certain types of Symbiodinium and bacteria confer coral stress tolerance, and lack or loss of these symbionts coincides with diseased or bleached corals. However, a detailed understanding of the coral holobiont diversity and structure in regard to diseases and health states or across global scales is missing. This dissertation addressed coral-associated symbiont diversity, specifically of Symbiodinium and bacteria, in various coral species from different geographic locations and different health states. The main aims were (1) to expand the scope of existing technologies, (2) to establish a standardized framework to facilitate comparison of symbiont assemblages over coral species and sites, (3) to assess Symbiodinium diversity in the Arabian Seas, and (4) to elucidate whether coral health states have conserved bacterial footprints. In summary, a next generation sequencing pipeline for Symbiodinium diversity typing of the ITS2 marker is developed and applied to describe Symbiodinium diversity in corals around the Arabian Peninsula. The data show that corals in the Arabian Seas are dominated by a single Symbiodinium type, but harbor a rich variety of types in low abundant. Further, association with different Symbiodinium types is structured according to geographic locations. In addition, the application of 16S rRNA gene microarrays to investigate how differences in microbiome structure relate to differences in health and disease demonstrate that coral species share common microbial footprints in phenotypically similar diseases that are conserved between regional seas. Moreover, corals harbor bacteria that are species-specific and distinct from the diseased microbial footprints. The existence of conserved coral disease microbiomes allows for cataloging diseases based on bacterial assemblage over coral species boundaries and will greatly facilitate future comparative analyses.

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a distinct female voice has emerged in Persian fictional literature which has ventured beyond the established feminine stereotype of male literary tradition, and remarkably valorized female identities through focusing on interests and concerns of Iranian women, from feminist issues to social and political problems to cultural and moral dilemmas. This body of literature that has been gradually developed, tries to reflect realistic depictions of female protagonists with emotional, intellectual, and moral complexity. To study this progressive process, this research has focused on characterization of seven female protagonists that have been created by different generations of Iranian female authors in the genre of novel.

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Morphologiestruktur der verschiedenen Sprachperioden im Persischen, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf der Wortbildung liegt. Des Weiteren wird der Versuch unternommen, die innere Struktur der Wörter in Bezug auf die Wortbildung auf verschiedenen Zeitebenen zu erforschen und die Wortbildungsmuster zu analysieren.

This dissertation is a study of the composition and reception of two chronicles written in Arabic in the first decades of the fourth century of the Islamic hijrī era (the tenth century of the current era). They were written by a little-known scholar usually called Abū Muḥammad Aḥmad ibn A‘tham al-Kūfī. Although no complete copy of the Arabic histories survives, the history was widely circulated in Persian. In other words, unlike most authors, Ibn A‘tham became somewhat more famous as his text circulated further. This work sets out to explain how this came to happen in two parts. The first part examines the composition of Ibn A‘tham’s history, arguing on biobibliographical, paleographical, and textual evidence that Ibn A‘tham must have belonged to the first decades of the fourth/tenth century. This argument serves as prelude to the second part, in which I show how Ibn A‘tham’s history developed over time, watching as selective readings and manuscript damage led to reduced engagements with Ibn A‘tham. Here, by examining how other historians quoted Ibn A‘tham, I track the logics of writing and reading that guided their encounters. The dissertation culminates in the sixth chapter, in which I provide a conceptual history for the Persian translation, showing how Ibn A‘tham’s history was re-imagined and prepared for its yet-bright future as a work of Persian historiography. Ultimately, I try to show the critical place filled by the culture of writing shared between Arabic and Persian: Rather than a firm boundary between two distinct languages, in the lens of Ibn A‘tham’s history, we observe a zone of interaction and innovation.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach that studies the relationship between power, language, ideology, and social structures in the various forms of discourse.  Fairclough’s three-dimensional model was employed as the foundation and van Dijk’s ideological square as an assist to deepen the analytical focus on the speeches held by George H. W Bush addressing Somalia and Kuwait. The size of conflict and period differ, this study sees the relevance of comparing the two speeches since they were given by the same person during his period as presidents of the United States and Commander in Chief. The results have shown how Bush uses language to lay arguments for U.S. military action in the out-group nations. By employing concepts such as national self-glorification, empathy, lexicalization, victimization, and polarization: He lay the grounds for the U.S. interventions through language. The results show that representing the United States in a positive light and the out-groups in a negative light e.g. as threat leads to the justification for U.S. intervention but also exposes the underlying power structures and inequality of power.

The aim of this study is to determine and define the Persian Achaemenid style produced in the North-Western satrapies (imperial provinces) of Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the period of the Persian dominion of the area, roughly 550 - 300 BCE. The North-Western Anatolian satrapies are the II. nomos of Herodotus - Sardes, and Hellespontine Phrygia (the III. nomos). The roots of the Achaemenid style emerge from the rich artistic traditions of the cultures in the area of modern Iran influenced by Mesopotamian sources as well as nomadic handicrafts. The expansion of the Empire towards the Aegean resulted in extensive contacts with the creative expression of the Anatolian kingdoms and especially the Greek sphere. A unique style of luxurious ware, designated for customers of the local elite and Persian immigrants, is created. The depiction of the Persian court iconography is modified according to the local art-school customs. The clearest representation of the Achaemenid style is observed in the metalware production. The forms and designs of golden and silver vessels are specific. Despite their wide geographic distribution, the majority of the workshops were supposedly located in the area of modern Turkey. The production of jewelry and gems was most likely concentrated in the same workshops. The creative...

Evaluation of machine translation is an important step towards improving MT. One way to evaluate the output of MT is to focus on different types of errors occurring in the translation hypotheses, and to think of possible solutions to fix those errors. An error categorization is a rather beneficent tool that makes it easy to analyze the translation errors and can also be utilized to manually generate post-editing rules to be applied automatically to the product of machine translation. In this work, we define a categorization for the errors occurring in Swedish--Persian machine translation by analyzing the errors that occur in three data-sets from two websites: 1177.se, and Linköping municipality. We define three types of monolingual reference free evaluation (MRF), and use two automatic metrics BLEU and TER, to conduct a bilingual evaluation for Swedish-Persian translation. Later on, based on the experience of working with the errors that occur in the corpora, we manually generate automatic post-editing (APE) rules and apply them to the product of machine translation. Three different sets of results are obtained: (1) The results of analyzing MT errors show that the three most common types of errors that occur in the translation hypotheses are mistranslated words, wrong word order, and extra prepositions. These types of errors are placed in semantic and syntactic categories respectively. (2) The results of comparing the correlation between the automatic and manual evaluation show a low correlation between the two evaluations. (3) Lastly, applying the APE rules to the product of machine translation gives an increase in BLEU score on the largest data-set while remaining almost unchanged on the other two data-sets. The results for TER show a better score on one data-set, while the scores on the two other data-sets remain unchanged.

This dissertation seeks to explain why states sometimes produce disintegrated wartime grand strategies; doing so is of both scholarly and policy importance because wartime grand strategy is a key component of military effectiveness, and therefore has a vital role to play in military victory or defeat. To do so, this dissertation explores the link between militarism, civil-military bargaining, and the formation of integrated—or disintegrated—grand strategy. I hypothesize that civilians and military leaders possess divergent preferences over the use of force that are exogenous to any one conflict, and represent enduring, rational preference divergences between civilian and military positions on the use of force. Under conditions of militarism, defined as high levels of societal admiration for the military, the civil-military bargaining space will be distorted in favor of military preferences, with the military having more power in the civil-military negotiating process due to its potentially outsized ability to shape public opinion compared to civilians. This will lead to the formation of disintegrated grand strategy—one which does not balance civilian and military preferences—which has been shown in the literature to be linked to reduced military effectiveness. I provide evidence for my hypotheses in the form of two case studies which are examined via process-tracing methodology—the United States performance in the 1991 Gulf War, and the United States performance in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I conclude that under conditions of militarism, states produce disintegrated wartime grand strategies.