A Cognitive-Constructional Account of Polysemy in “Head-Compounds”: A comparison between Persian and English

The aim of this comparative research is to investigate the polysemy of “head-compounds” in Persian and English and to identify the constructional schemas governing the construction of these compounds based on Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010). To this end, all compounds consisting of “head” as their first constituent were collected from different Persian and English sources. Our data consist of 300 compound words collected from Comprehensive Sokhan Dictionary, Zansoo Dictionary, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Online Merriom-Webster, Collins, and Cambridge Dictionaries. Then the collected compounds were semantically categorized and their similarities and differences were examined. The findings showed that the polysemy in these compounds could be explained not at the level of words, but at the level of abstract constructions and constructional schemas in both languages. Therefore, it was considered as a type of constructional polysemy. Moreover, it was found that although there were similar constructional schemas and subschemas for "head-compounds” in both languages, the semantic variations and the number of subschemas in Persian were more than that of English. This difference indicated that the schematic hierarchy of the construction [Head-X] in Persian was more semantically complex and more extended compared to English.