Persian Agentive Compound Words Ending in 'PAZ' Present Stem:Construction Morphology Approach

The presentstudy investigated the semantic variationsof the agentive compound wordsending in paz present stem in Persian within the framework of Construction morphology. For this purpose, the168words were collected from Persian synchronic and diachronic corpora. These words were divided into four semantic categories of the characteristics of a human agent,agentive person,job and instrument,and belong to the two main lexical categories of adjective and noun. The diachronic investigation of the extracted words revealed that since 5 th century A.H Persian speakers have created a schema for denoting to words of job semantic category. Then,in the second half of the present century,they have developed a new schema for coining instruments by the help of approximation process. Further,it was revealed that the traditional hypothesis of metaphorical extension of agent to instrument does not hold in Persian. Also,the two constructions of agentive noun and agentive adjective of compound words ending in 'paz' are sister constructions.