Humorous Grammatical Innovations in Contemporary Persian Press

This paper attempts to examine humorous grammatical innovations in contemporary Persian press in recent years within the framework of Bybee’s language change theory (2015) in accordance with the usage-based approach to grammer. In this regard, by collecting data from satirical press, this research endeavored to understand how and by which process these innovations have been produced, in which constructions they have been used and what characteristics they have. To this end, the humorous grammatical innovations have been classified in three categories consisting of derivatives constructions, fabricated verbs and constructions with “al-“. In this research, we demonstrate that a high number of innovations have been created on the basis of analogical processes. Furthermore the findings suggest that seemingly most of the innovations have the potentiality to enter the formal language but evidently the language enclines to absorb the innovations which have been coined by virtue of the language exigency or the deficits of applicable grammatical constructions.