Shadi Davari; Behnaz Koukabi
Abstract
While affixation is a major morphological device for the creation of new words and word forms among the languages of the world, there are many restrictions on the ordering of affixes ...
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While affixation is a major morphological device for the creation of new words and word forms among the languages of the world, there are many restrictions on the ordering of affixes within a word. In this research, we attempt to use the Bybee (1985) semantic framework, as “the relevance principle”, in examining of the affix and clitic ordering of the Mazandarani dialect of Mahmoudabad, one of the dialects of the northwest of Iran. The research data indicate that the relevance principle in relation to the ordering of time-setting, polarity, contradiction, and derivative, as well as non-intermediate words in Mazandarani, are effective. Only in the case of the derivative order of the object trait, failure to follow this principle is observed. In addition, it was found that as the distance between an affix and the root is greater than the basic lexical content, it is further located in the syntax. It is therefore the case that the matching affixes and the object-oriented clitics which are more related to the syntax and syntactic relations (the subject and the object), not the semantic and the lexical ones, always represent the greatest distance with the verb roots. Due to the syntactic nature, the aforementioned elements in addition to be more general and broader, have the highest frequency of occurrence and hence, they are more syntactic.
