The Persian Suffixes ‘-zɑr’, ‘-kæde’, and ‘-estɑn’ within the Framework of Construction Morphology

The purpose of the present research is to investigate three Persian derivational suffixes ‘-zɑr’, ‘-kæde’ and ‘-estɑn’ from a construction-based perspective and to analyze their various formal and semantic aspects. The study applies the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010, 2018) to address the word-formation patterns based on the notions of ‘construction’ and ‘constructional schema’ and explain their polysemy using the notion of ‘constructional subschema’. The research data are adapted from author’s own morphological corpus (including more than 12000 Persian compound and affixed words), Farhang-e Emlaee Khatt-e Farsi (Sadeghi & Zandi-Moghadam, 2012) and Farhang-e Zānsoo (Reverse Dictionary, Keshani 1993) which include 187 derivative words with the three aforementioned suffixes. The results reveal that in order to explain the polysemy of word-formation patterns of these suffixes, we need to adopt the idea of hierarchical lexicon and the notion of constructional subschemas so that we can consider distinct meanings as different subschemas. These subschemas are at different levels of abstraction and are related to a more abstract, high-order schema. This is called constructional polysemy, a kind of polysemy explained not at the level of concrete words, but rather at the level of abstract constructional schemas.