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Article published In:
Constructions and Frames
Vol. 14:2 (2022) ► pp.262–300

Modelling polysemy and categorial ambiguity in a constructional family

The case of agentive compounds in Persian

| University of Isfahan
| University of Isfahan
| Leiden University

In this paper we analyse a family of compound constructions in Persian that show two interesting properties: (1) they split into two semantic patterns, human agent noun and instrument noun, and (2) they display categorial ambiguity between noun and adjective. The compounds in question, which are formed with the verbal stem -yāb ‘find’, are collected from diachronic and synchronic corpora and analysed in the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010). We argue that the instrumental pattern is an innovation under the influence of loan-translated English instrument nouns. This pattern dovetailed with a much older morphological construction for human agent nouns. This raises questions about the relation between the two constructions in the contemporary speaker’s lexicon. For the dual functionality of the words as nouns and adjectives, we argue that it can be understood as a second order schema (Booij & Masini 2015) or sister construction (Jackendoff & Audring 2019, 2020), whereby no precedence is ascribed to either of the two patterns.

Keywords: Construction Morphology, polysemy, compound, partial motivation, sister constructions, second-order schemas, Persian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Construction morphology
  • 3.Semantic classification
  • 4.Relations within the constructional family
    • 4.1Metaphorical extension of human agent to instrument
    • 4.2The diachrony of the [X-yāb] compounds
    • 4.3Loan translation
    • 4.4Relatedness
  • 5.Agent nouns and agentive adjectives as sister constructions
    • 5.1Nominal and adjectival uses
      • 5.1.1Syntactic configurations
      • 5.1.2Morphological and semantic configurations
    • 5.2Sister constructions
  • 6.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 22 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.21007.azi
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