Polysemy in Persian Compound Verbs within Construction Morphology Theory: The Case of Gereftæn Light Verb

The present study aims at examining the patterns of Persian compound verbs formation with “ցereftæn” light verb and their polysemy based on Construction Morphology theory (Booij, 2010a & b). The data of this study which includes 300 compound verbs with the light verb "ցereftæn" are gathered from Zanso dictionary (Keshani, 1994), Sokhan (2002), syntactic valency lexicon for Persian verbs corpus (Moloudi, Kouhestani and Rasouli, 2011), Persian calligraphy spelling dictionary (Sadeghi and Zandi Moghaddam, 2016), and Persian online dictionary. To explain the polysemy between the compound verbs and to recognize their construction pattern, by accepting the idea of using the concept of structural scheme and sub-scheme, all meanings to each pattern of formation of these verbs in the form of sub-scheme was drawn separately. However, these structural sub-schemas were at different levels of abstraction. According to the concepts of default inheritance, the motivation and hierarchy of lexicon, all structural sub-schemas were placed under a high-order general abstract scheme. The results showed that the polysemy analysis of linguistic units within construction morphology framework, cognitive approach, construction-based and "word-based" which occurred at the abstract level of the structural scheme. For compound verbs formation with “ցereftæn” light verb, seven general structural schemes were identified and plotted, each of which was divided into several structural sub-schemes. Finally, a complete network and hierarchy of these construction schemas were presented.