The Study of Semantic Frames and the Way of Expressing Direction in Persian Motion Verbs: Case of “Come” and “Go”

Abstract

Focusing on the two paths bala (=up ) and payin (=down) and the combination of these two with the motion verbs rᴂftᴂn (=go) and amᴂdᴂn (=come), the present research has attempted to make a comparison between the semantic frames of the verbs made out of the two paths in Persian and English so that it can examine the practicality of the FrameNet for describing the Persian language. To this end, a number of 120 sentences including the aforementioned path verbs were extracted from the major Corpus of Bijankhan and then, it was attempted to make a comparison between the semantic frames of each verb with their English counterparts via the FrameNet database. Ultimately, comparing the frames, the authors concluded that for those Persian path verbs which encode path or direction on the prefix adverb of the verb, the FrameNet provides a frame different from their English equivalents. On the other hand, in the current study, the metaphorical relationships of these verbs with other semantic frames were also addressed. The general conclusion was that language-specificity of the relation, the syntactic representation of the verbs, and different encoding of direction are good indication of the necessity of considering linguistic distinctions for additional practicality of the FrameNet to describe other languages.

Keywords

• path
• direction
• motion verb
• framenet
• semantic frame