Default Inheritance in Constructional Schemas of Persian Complex words

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of Linguistics, ,Faculty of Humanities, Hazrat-e Masoumeh University, Qom , Iran

Abstract

This research investigates how to specify grammatical features of Persian complex words, including morphological, syntactic, and semantic features in the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010 &2017). In this regard, 200 complex words were examined using a descriptive-analytical method. The findings showed complex words received grammatical features including morphological/ semantic features and categories from the main schema and subschemas dominating them through the inheritance mechanism. Also, suffixes -esh and -an in complex words are realized as an exponent of some part of their construction and their different meanings are due to their presence in a construction with a polysemous pattern.
 
Furthermore, assuming the existence of two formal and semantic aspects in the construction of these words and establishing a systematic relationship between the two, a unified method can be used for explaining all types of data in this research, although its challenge is what makes the grammatical analysis of the construction of this type of Persian data partially unconstrained. In sum, the meaning of different data with different morphological complexity is motivated through polysemous pattern, subpart relationship and construction-bound meaning in schema and its subschemas. More importantly, by attaining a few constructional subschemas under the dominance of the main schema, it is possible to explain less regular and idiosyncratic Persian data as well as regular ones, without looking for secondary solutions for different meanings of the above suffixes in Persian derived words and constructional idioms, zero morphs for suffixless compounds and right-head/left-head rule for compounds in accounting for irregularities.

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References

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Journal of Iranian Dialects & Linguistics
Volume 9, Issue 2
March 2025
Pages 1-18

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History

  • Receive Date: 20 November 2024
  • Revise Date: 08 January 2025
  • Accept Date: 29 January 2025

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