A Study of Polysemy in Four Negative Non-Verbal Prefixes in ‎Persian based on Principled Polysemy: A Corpus-Based Approach

This article explores the polysemy of four negative non-verbal prefixes in Persian language (zedd ‎‎'against, opposite of', bi 'without', nā 'not' and qejr 'not, non-') based on Principled Polysemy ‎framework (Tyler and Evans 2001, 2003). First, the primary sense of each prefix is determined ‎and then it is explained how non-primary senses are derived from the primary one, hence ‎demonstrating the semantic network of each prefix as a radial category. In this research, using ‎AntConc software (Anthony, 2014), first all the occurrences of the four prefixes were extracted ‎from the Hamshahri Corpus Version 2 (AleAhmad, Amiri, Darrudi, Rahgozar & Oroumchian, ‎‎2009) and then in order to analyze research data, some of them were randomly selected. The ‎findings of the study indicate that only in three of the four prefixes under study, polysemy is ‎observed, and that the frequency of use, ease of derivation and predominance in the semantic ‎network are the best criteria for determining the primary sense. The conceptual phenomenon ‎involved in the polysemy of these prefixes is metonymy. Data analysis shows that metonymical ‎shift occurs at two levels: at the level of morpheme/prefix sense and at the level of word-‎formation, and that the former leads to more straightforward relations within the semantic ‎network. This is due to the fact that the latter requires a more complex line of imagination which ‎automatically translates into a corresponding complexity of relations in the semantic network and ‎significant reduction in the type frequency of non-primary senses as a whole.‎