Functions and Applications of Dvandva in Persian Literary Texts

In Persian, compound words that are produced by the structural pattern of “word + and + word = word” are called vāzhahʿaṭf, and naming the word as such emphasizes the compound nature of this type of construction in contrast to combination and coordinate syntactic group. In view of the linguistic and grammatical studies that form the background of the present study, which have investigated the structural and semantic features of this compound structure and explained the relationships between its coordinate constituents from various aspects, vāzhahʿaṭf often has a compound meaning and creates a clear mental image, and it is used for the purposes of neologism and categorization in Persian. The present research, while paying attention to these features, describes and qualitatively analyzes the applications of this grammatical construction in a corpus consisting of several literary texts. Findings show that the constituents of this compound construction, due to its syntactic construction, have lexical collocation and performative independence. These features has led to the widespread practice of displacing, separating and changing such constituents and their order in the narrative literary texts. Nizami has frequently used the conjunction type in his Khamsah, Mowlana has distinctly made use of the itbāʿī compound and phonetic conjunctions in his poetry, and the phonetic conjunctions are frequently employed in Nīmā’ī and contemporary lyric poetry. In addition, the similarity of the structure of vāzhahʿaṭf and coordinate syntactic constructions in literary texts in such works as Saʿdi’s poetry and Hafez’s ghazals, and the syntactic arrangement and distribution of words in order to create proportion is such that the distinction between conjunctions and coordinate syntactic group is blurred.