A Constructional Study of the Compounds of Body Part “Del” (Heart) in Persian

This study aims at examining the construction of the word-formation pattern of [del-X] (compounds of “heart”) and investigating its semantic variations, the most general schema and subschemas in Persian employing the Construction Morphology approach (Booij, 2010). To this end, a collection of 71 compound words starting with “del” were collected from Bijankhan Corpus, Dehkhoda and Zansoo Dictionaries and Google. Then they were assigned to different categories based on their semantic variations and the specified categories were closely studied. The results reveal that one general constructional schema and Three subschemas have command of this construction and the central meaning “distinctive feature of an entity related to SEM del and X” is the most abstract pairing of form-meaning understood from all products of this word-formation pattern. This implies that the [del-X] pattern is basically an adjective-making construction and the usage of its compound words in nominal category is through conversion activated by metonymy. Furthermore, it was revealed that the polysemy we deal with here is not at the word level but it is at the construction level.