Inheritance and Motivation of Form and Meaning in Lexicon: Instantiations of Persian Word Formation Patterns

Default inheritance is one of the critical notions in network approaches to language which considers linguistic knowledge to be comprised of constructional nodes at different levels of abstraction and hierarchical relations among them. Based on this mechanism, properties are inherited from higher to lower nodes unless the lower node already has other specifications for the property. The importance of this mechanism becomes evident when describing a set of linguistic constructions which show some differences despite having common features. The use of default inheritance enables us not only to maintain the generalizations governing similar constructions, but also to justify the differences among them. It also makes it possible to show the connectedness of such constructions in the language network without the need for labeling the slightly deviated instances as exceptional. Through applying a construction-based morphology and focusing on the interpretation of default inheritance as motivation, the present paper tries to explain the role of word formation patterns in the production and understanding of complex words which do not necessarily correspond to their governing patterns regarding all their form-meaning specifications. To this end, instantiations of three Persian word formation patterns, «-zɑr», «-eʃ» and «ɑmiz», are investigated and the existence of apparently exceptional instances associated with these patterns is justified through three concepts of constructional schemas, default inheritance and gradient motivation.