A Semantic Analysis of the Verb dowr zædæn (to turn around) in Persian: A FrameNet-Based Account [In English]

The investigation of semantic frames evoked by various syntactic categories has always been the focus of study in the field of cognitive linguistics. Here, the syntactic category is a verb and the hypothesis is that as the verb dowr zᴂdᴂn (to turn around) is a polysemous motion verb in Persian, it is expected that just as there is an association among its meanings, there will also be a relation among the semantic frames evoked by it. In order to test the hypothesis, the findings of this research, which are composed of different situations where the verb was used, were extracted from the Persian Corpus of Bijankhan at the first stage. Then, the duplicate cases were eliminated so that only one type  of each situation would remain. Having been translated into English and searched through the FrameNet database, the Persian cases alongside their frames were compared and analysed; as a result of which, it was identified that the hypothesis was confirmed, as there is a semantic association among the semantic frames the polysemous motion verb in question evokes—revolving around an object or deviating from the main path.