Constraints on the Productivity of Denominal and Deadjectival Verbs in Standard Farsi

The present research aims to investigate constraints on the productivity of denominal verbs and deadjectival verbs in Standard Farsi. Also, the relation between transparency and productivity of this verb pattern is considered. The study method is descriptive-analytic and the data collection is corpus-based. For this purpose, a list of 90 respective verbs from a self-made written corpus including 824000 words and also a spoken corpus which is recorded from daily conversations of Persian speakers are provided. The token frequency of these verbs in written and spoken corpus is respectively 1700 and 775. Studies show that these verbs do not select vowel-ending words as their base. Also, most of the bases for such verbs are monosyllabic and few are disyllabic. About the morphological constraints it should be noted that, among different word categories only nouns and adjectives are used as the base for these verbs. But the main factor restricting the productivity of such verbs is blocking in which synonymous compound verbs block the construction of equivalent simple verbs. Despite the structural constraints mentioned, which block the construction of potential verbs with this pattern, pragmatic constraint has a substantial role in refusal of actual verbs by language users. Also, about the relation between transparency and productivity it is found that semantic transparency have no effect on the productivity of these verbs.