A Constructionist Account on Affixoids in Endocentric Persian Compounds: A Case Study of Animal Words

Affixoids are words that exhibit an affix-like behaviour. In the Persian language, some constituents that are used at the beginning or end of some compound words, are affixoids. The main purpose of this research is to study the Persian endocentric nonverbal Compound constructions which have an affixoid constituent within the framework of Construction Morphology (CM). The data analyzed in this study has been gathered from six sources: Reverse Dictionary (Zansu) (Keshani, 1993), Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB), FarsNet, Farhang-e Bozorg-e Sokhan (Anvari, 2002), Google and Persian Wikipedia. After gathering the data, obsolete and old items have been excluded. The findings of the research show that the animal words (xar) “doncky” , (shir) “lion” and (sag) “dog” are affixoids in some of the endocentric nonverbal Persian compounds with a wholistic and predictable meaning. Also, there is a constructional schema for each of these compounds, in which the meaning of each components and their relationship, encyclopedic knowledge, context, as well as metaphor, play a significant role in determining the meaning of these compounds.