A Study of the Semantic Network of " -gah" Suffix of Location in Persian: A Cognitive Perspective

As a suffix of location of high frequency, “-gah” is attached to different nouns to create a kind of radial semantic structure. Drawing upon data from contemporary Persian, this paper tries to determine the prototypical meaning, semantic network, and structure of this suffix modeled as a radial category within the framework of cognitive semantics, and to determine what semantic structure this linguistic category has, and what aspect/aspects of reality it encodes with regard to location. The findings show that while it holds the prototypical meaning of location of action, affected by its nominal base frame this suffix entails the foregrounding of parts of the meaning expressed by the base word in different linguistic contexts and in combination with different nouns. In this analysis, the role of metaphor and metonymy, as well as pragmatic and cultural elements, in creating a peculiar semantic aspect using this suffix, and also in selecting this suffix and preferring it over other suffixes of location in Persian are of great importance.