The Study of Semantic Motivation in the Written Persian Language of Two Courses of time (200 years ago and the present time)

Motivation means the existence of a clue in the form for understanding the meaning, the device which guides us directly towards meaning. So the relation between form and meaning isn’t always arbitrary and sometimes this relation may be an iconic one. One sort of motivation is semantic motivation. Those words have semantic motivation that there is a semantic relation between their components and the meaning of the whole word. Some people believe that primary words were more iconic and by passage of time as well as phonetic changes, this motivation has been reduced. In this research, a more powerful and a more exact attention paid into it. To consider this hypothesis, four travel accounts from the present time were selected and 2800 content words from them were extracted. Then the semantic motivation in those words was analyzed. Afterwards, the results of these texts were compared with the results from considering 2800 words of texts from 200 years ago in order to answer the question that since 200 years ago, motivation in Persian language had been increased or decreased. The Comparison of the results of two courses of time showed a meaningful increase in the number of words with semantic motivation in the present time in comparison with 200 years ago. Therefore, it might be claimed that since 200 years ago, words with semantic motivation have increased.