Reflexive Compounds in Persian: A Grammaticalization ‎Account

The term‘‘reflexive’’has been used throughout the history of linguistics in the sense of referring to the function of marking two arguments of a verb as co-referential. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the deverbal compound nouns derived from reflexives and reflexive intensifiers in Persian. It argues that the verbal part of these compound nouns provides information about the noun’s argument structure. Typically, the two argument positions inherited from the underlying transitive verb must be filled by the same argument. In other words, the relevant nominals express a reflexive meaning. Given that we are dealing with the interface of grammar and the lexicon, it should not come as a surprise that we find a certain amount but not a total degree of semantic compositionality in this domain. Following Konig (2011) and the principles of grammaticalization theory, we will show that the reflexives and intensifiers component encode the same content as their syntactic meaning. It is further demonstrated that the reflexive meaning, direct object and the frequency of "xod" are more documented than the intensifier function, indirect object and the frequency of xiš and xištan.