An Analysis of Persian‌ Compound Nouns as Constructions

Abstract

In Construction Morphology (CM), a compound is treated as a construction at the word level with a systematic correlation between its form and meaning, in the sense that any change in the form is accompanied by a change in the meaning. Compound words are coined by compounding templates which are called abstract schemas in CM. These abstract constructional schemas generalize over sets of existing compound words and specify how new compound words can be created. The schemas dominate the compounds so that they inherit all predictable morphological and semantic properties from these schemas. Also, CM adopts a paradigmatic approach to word formation, that is, the creation of new compound words is caused by the extension of a systematic form-meaning relationship in a set of existing compound words to new cases resulting in new compounds. Regarding these properties of CM, This paper studies Persian compound nouns in the framework of Construction Morphology. From this perspective, two types of compound nouns including endocentric and exocentric ones are treated in a rather similar way because the compound noun construction as a holistic schema plays the main role in specifying the syntactic features and semantic content of compound nouns, not their individual constituents. According to findings of this study, the analysis of Persian compound nouns based on CM increases the degree of generality in compound noun formation and develops the concept of holisticity in the form and meaning of compound nouns as well as it highlights the paradigmatic relationship in Persian compound noun formation templates.

Keywords

• constructional schema
• construction
• systematic correlation between form and meaning
• hierarchical lexicon
• holisticity
• paradigmatic relationship