Polysemy of the Preposition " be" in Persian Based on Cognitive Semantics

Studying prepositions in Persian can be a step to recognize the complexity of Persian language which will also help to explain its structure. The purpose of this research is to study different meanings of Persian preposition “be” according to cognitive semantic approach. To this end, Tyler and Evans′s principled polysemy approach (2003) has been selected to analyze the data. To achieve this goal, the data were collected from the texts of different Persian books and daily conversations and analyzed using the approach mentioned above. The results indicated that this preposition has different meanings all derived from a single meaning, making thus a joint connected network with all distinct meanings systematically derived from the protoscene and the primary sense as proposed by Tyler and Evans′s (2003) criteria. Also, it was shown that metaphor is one of the origins of polysemy, because it was made clear that metonymical uses of prepositions cause the accumulation of metaphoric meanings to the single explicit meaning of the preposition making it polysemic. In fact, the derived meanings of prepositions in polysemy are the result of metaphoric extension of central meanings.