The Polysemy of Suffix “-ɑne”: A Construction Morphology Approach

The purpose of the present research is to analyze the Persian suffix ‘- ɑne’ and to examine its various structural and semantic/functional aspects. The study adopts a construction-based approach and uses the framework of Construction Morphology theory which tries to explain the word formation patterns using the notions of “construction” and “constructional schemas” and to shows hierarchical relations among constructional schemas and subschemas in a systematic manner. The data includes 944 derivative words with the suffix ‘-ɑne’ which are adapted from author’s own morphological corpus (including more than 10000 Persian compound and affixed words), Farhang-e Zānsoo (Reverse Dictionary, Keshani 1993) and Farhang-e Pasvand dar Zabān-e Fārsi (The Dictionary of Persian Suffixes, Ravaghi 2009). The findings of the research show that the suffix “-ɑne” has a remarkable semantic diversity and can appears in 12 constructional subschemas to form new nouns, adjectives or adverbs. This polysemy is not explainable at the level of concrete words but at the level of abstract constructional schemas, and therefore is called “constructional polysemy”.