The semantic reading of idiomatic compound verbs in Farsi

Compound verbs are among the important linguistic categories in different languages which have been the subject of many studies from different aspects of syntactic, semantic, and cognitive researches. A compound verb can be said that is a verb formed from two (or even more) parts: a verb, and mostly a noun, or an adverb or a preposition. A compound verb functions as a single verb. It has two components one of which is a light verb , which carries inflections, and it contributes to some extent to the whole meaning. The other part is typically a noun which bears the most of the semantics of a compound. In this paper, the semantic features of idiomatic compound verbs of the spoken Farsi will be described and analyzed to reach out the possible explanation behind the semantic reading of those compound verbs in Farsi. From spoken Farsi in Tehran, 181 idiomatic compound verbs were selected based on our intuition and observations. This non-compositionality results in opacity, and it is not easy for Farsi learners to guess the meanings. A new non-compositional hypothesis will be proposed in this paper which explains the process of interpretation and reading of an idiomatic compound verb is essentially based on the non-verbal element of the compound and the figurative and idiomatic meaning is activated based on a marked collocation with a verb with which the non-verbal part has no semantic compositionality. This hypothesis is called Three-layered reading of idiomatic compounds.