Semantic Variations of Persian Compound Words Ending in the Present Stem -Yɑ̃B: Construction Morphology Approach

This study investigated the semantic variations of the compound words ending in yɑb‘find’ in Persian based on Construction morphology.For this purpose,the words concerned were collected from Persian synchronic and diachronic corpora.These words weredivided into three semantic categories of the characteristics of a human/non-human agent,instrument and personagent nouns,and belongto the two main lexical categories of adjective and noun.The diachronic investigation of the words revealed that the traditional hypothesis of the extension of the concept of agent to instrument was not applied in Persian.Rather,the noun ellipsis was involved in the formation of the two concepts of agent and instrument from the concept of the characteristics of the human/non-human agent in Persian. The loan translation of some words of English into Persian has been influential in the occurrence of such a process.The findings of this study revealed that the initial meaning of the construction should be considered as“the distinguishing characteristic of the entity related to the concept of finding and the first component”which is the most abstract correlation between form and meaning controlling the function of the compound words of[x-[yɑ̃b]VPRES] construction in Persian.It seems that the “person” noun ellipsis has led to the formation of a schema with the meaning of“an agent performing the task of finding in relation to the concept of the first component”.A similar schema was used in the formation of the instrument schema with the meaning of “an object performing the task of finding in relation to the concept of the first component” through the applicationof the“device/software” noun ellipsis.