مطالب

It is becoming an established strategy to add humor in Persian subtitles even often when the original dialogue does not include the created or any other humor. This study measures the impact of this strategy on viewers’ attention allocation while reading subtitles. The eye movements of 32 participants were recorded while watching a humorous and non-humorous version of the same scene extracted from Superchondriac (Boon, 2014), a French comedy. The results show that there is a significant difference between attention allocation in the two versions, and the viewers’ attention to the subtitles with added humor is significantly larger than non-humorous subtitles. The interviews showed that some viewers liked the added humor because they thought it is funny and close to their cultural and ideological views. On the other hand, some of the participants opted for the non-humorous subtitles because they thought the added humor was distracting, confusing, at times offensive, and detached from the original culture.

Few studies have addressed the interaction among reader and text variables in reading comprehension. This research probed the role of aspects of lexical knowledge to the TOEFL reading comprehension of passages with low and high lexical cohesion. The extent of this contribution was checked for five types of TOEFL reading test items: Main Idea, Stated Detail, Inference, Reference, and Lexical Inferencing. For this purpose, 60 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) took the New Vocabulary Levels Test (NVLT), Word Associates Test (WAT), and TOEFL reading comprehension tests with low and high lexical cohesion determined through the computational tool Coh-Metrix. Results of Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed that the students outperformed on three types of TOEFL reading items (Main Idea, Inference, and Lexical Inferencing) for texts with high lexical cohesion. Multiple linear regression analyses further showed that vocabulary depth was a stronger predictor of the participants’ scores on Lexical Inferencing item of TOEFL reading texts with high lexical cohesion, while vocabulary size predicted the same item performance for the low-lexical-cohesion subtest. Moreover, vocabulary depth could significantly predict performance on Main Idea test item of TOEFL high-lexical-cohesion subtest over and above the low-lexical-cohesion subtest. The implications for teachers, test designers, and materials writers are discussed.

Eco-friendly product usage is a defining trend in consumer purchase intentions during this decade. Younger, tech-savvy consumers are often more sensitive to environmental concerns when purchasing products due to the abundance of information available on social media platforms. In the food and beverage industry, this trend has led many younger consumers to prefer purchasing eco-friendly, sustainable cutlery for food and beverage consumption. With online social commerce platforms selling eco-friendly utensils readily available, a larger group of consumers, primarily young adults, seem to purchase these products impulsively due to various factors. The four independent variables proposed in this study that seem to influence the online impulse buying behavior of young adults toward these eco-friendly products are fear, serendipity, electronic word of mouth (eWOM), and website quality. Convenience sampling was utilized to gain a greater understanding of the targeted consumer group, using a 5-item Likert scale to collect data from respondents. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire items were further confirmed using statistical methods, namely average variance extracted (AVE), composite reliability (CR), and Cronbach’s alpha. The hypotheses were tested using AMOS software (version 24) through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to tabulate the results. Based on the study conducted, it is concluded that fear and eWOM do influence the online impulse buying of eco-friendly food utensils among young adults in Kuala Lumpur. It is further suggested that elements such as fear and eWOM play a significant role in online impulse purchases of eco-friendly utensils, as young adults rely heavily on social media marketing. This reliance contributes to these consumers’ growing concern for their future, prompting them to be more environmentally conscious.

The current research examines Stephen Greenblatt’s theories on the improvisation of power as well as tyranny in William Shakespeare’s second tetralogy to investigate the complex network of non-violent psychological domination of human being’s mind, by the manipulation of symbolic order through the stages of displacement and absorption. It examines how the Western psychic mobility and its embodiment in empathy and the improvisation of power affect the represented English society in the Medieval era and how the consequential power relationships impact on the ways of ruling the country. The improvisation of power deconstructs the vertical and hierarchical power relations and makes them more diagonal, horizontal or even upward. The represented Medieval English court is a dark labyrinth of conspiracy, intrigue, treason, and complicity. This duality roots in religious fundamentalism of Roman Catholic church. The tension between the two paradigms of court and church causes turbulence and chaos. The result is the absolute submission of the majority through the improvisation of power, which paves the ground for the Machiavellian minority to exert power and gratify their personal self-interest-driven plans, which are mostly tyrannical. Through the improvisation of power, the course of history could change.

The purpose of the present study is to explore the two concepts of time and space in postmodern lyric poetry of the two poets of the 1950s through the lens of the Heideggerian existential theory of time and space, which regards time as a horizon for understanding Being and distinguishes three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions , and (3) Dasein's spatiality. To fulfill this objective, some selected poems of the two poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Ted Hughes, were analyzed temporally and spatially. The findings suggested that the two poets tend to treat time and space existentially and reject eternality. It was revealed that they are existential poets whose existence is manifested in their quest for identity within the immediate world or the global world as well as their concerns for their homeland and ideals. In their poems, time and space are intermingled with Being and reflect each individual’s relationship with the world. The result of the analysis of poems showed that their poetry is not just the language of imagination and perception, but also the language of existence. The world is regarded as an existential space-time continuum and being-in-the-world is the fundamental ontological situation for Dasein. Accordingly, the world, like poetry, is a disclosure of things in nearness or distance, which matters to human beings