Analyzing the Process of Selecting Compounds as Headwords In " Sokhan" and " Moaser" Dictionaries

This study aims to reveal whether different contemporary Farsi dictionaries lexicographers choose those compound words made by productive word-formation processes as the headwords, and whether they follow the same procedure for selecting the headwords in lexicography or not. To do this, two monolingual Farsi Dictionaries have been selected based on their closeness to today's Spoken Farsi: “Sokhan” by Hasan Anvari (2003) and “Moaser e Emrooz” by Gholamhosein Sadri Afshar (2002). In this descriptive research, First, the compound words which were headwords in the dictionaries mentioned before were extracted (495 words in Anvari’s , and 605 words in Sadri Asher’s dictionaries). Then, these words have been classified into twenty five categories based on Tabatabaee (20102007). The analysis revealed that even those compounds formed by the productive and predictable word formation processes (e.g. noun present verb stem) have been used as headwords in these dictionaries. It has been concluded that the concept of wordhoodness or wordness which refers to the changing of the constituents larger than words, e.g. sentence, phrase and etc. into a word is the main criterion for selecting compounds as the headwords. On the other hand, this research revealed that the lexicographers follows almost the same method in selecting the headwords.