The Polysemy of “eye” Compounds in Persian:A Constructional Morphology Account

This paper aims at examining the construction of two word-formation patterns [cheshm-X] and [X-cheshm] (compounds of “eye”) and investigating their semantic variations, the most general schema and their subschemas in Persian based on Construction Morphology approach (Booij, 2010). The method of research is descriptive-analytic in nature and the data consist of 84 compound words collected from Bijankhan Corpus, Dehkhoda and Zansoo Dictionaries and Google. The research hypothesis was that a general constructional schema and several subschemas have command of the construction of “cheshm” compounds, and the concept of ‘distinctive feature of an entity related to SEM eye and X’ is the most abstract pairing of form-meaning understood from both word-formation patterns. The results showed that the meaning of the constituents and their relationship, encyclopedic knowledge, context, as well as the conceptual metaphor and metonymy play a significant role in determining the meaning of compounds. Finally, the research hypothesis, the existence of independent subschemas and the hierarchical construction in the mentioned word-formation patterns was rejected, because compounds of “cheshm” are considered only as instances of objective instantiations derived from the most abstract constructional schemas of compounding, namely [N-X]A, [X-N]A and [N-N]N, and not derived from the word-formation subschemas consisting of "cheshm".