Word construction
Fatemeh Zohrabi; Adel Rafiei
Abstract
The present study examined compound words ending in the past stem "Gasht" in construction morphology. This research tried to describe the diachronic and synchronic of the semantic variations and the schematic system of the words resulting from this construction. The data included 202 compound words collected ...
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The present study examined compound words ending in the past stem "Gasht" in construction morphology. This research tried to describe the diachronic and synchronic of the semantic variations and the schematic system of the words resulting from this construction. The data included 202 compound words collected from diachronic and synchronic corpuses of the Persian language, dictionaries, and Google search engine. Descriptive-analytical method was used to to answer these questions: what are the systematic semantic variations of the compound words taken from the past stem "Gasht"? What is the superlative construction of compound words derived from the past stem "Gasht"? What are the variations of this construction in diachronic view? For this purpose, the extracted words were classified into four semantic categories based on their meaning. Then the main schema was determined. Diachronic studies showed that from this construction in the past centuries, the word "Golgasht" was created in a different meaning from what is used today. We also see changes in the functioning of this construction in the social media. By taking diachronic changes and describing the synchronicity of this construction, the schematic system of the construction [x- gasht] was obtained. In the schematic system of this construction, two productive constructions and two static constructions are evident.
Fereshte Mahdavi; Batool Ainezhad; Adel Rafiei
Abstract
This paper investigates compensatory lengthening processes in Persian language based on Stratal Optimality Theory. Method of this survey is descriptive-analytic. Since Optimality Theory can’t analyze intermediate levels of morpho-phonemics processes, the presented study evaluates morpho-phonemics ...
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This paper investigates compensatory lengthening processes in Persian language based on Stratal Optimality Theory. Method of this survey is descriptive-analytic. Since Optimality Theory can’t analyze intermediate levels of morpho-phonemics processes, the presented study evaluates morpho-phonemics analysis in Persian within the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory. Stratal Optimality Theory posits constraint evaluation at three distinct levels or strata: stem, word and phrase level. This multi-level variation of the original OT model may provide more economical and elegant explanations. In this survey, attraction, glottal consonant deletion and compensatory lengthening processes are analyzed within Stratal Optimality Theory and the order of constraints in each level are indicated. Further cross-linguistic and theoretical research into the Stratal OT model is needed to establish its universality and superiority to other models.
Ava Imani; Adel Rafiei
Abstract
This paper aims at examining the construction of two word-formation patterns [cheshm-X] and [X-cheshm] (compounds of “eye”) and investigating their semantic variations, the most general schema and their subschemas in Persian based on Construction Morphology approach (Booij, 2010). The method ...
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This paper aims at examining the construction of two word-formation patterns [cheshm-X] and [X-cheshm] (compounds of “eye”) and investigating their semantic variations, the most general schema and their subschemas in Persian based on Construction Morphology approach (Booij, 2010). The method of research is descriptive-analytic in nature and the data consist of 84 compound words collected from Bijankhan Corpus, Dehkhoda and Zansoo Dictionaries and Google. The research hypothesis was that a general constructional schema and several subschemas have command of the construction of “cheshm” compounds, and the concept of ‘distinctive feature of an entity related to SEM eye and X’ is the most abstract pairing of form-meaning understood from both word-formation patterns. The results showed that the meaning of the constituents and their relationship, encyclopedic knowledge, context, as well as the conceptual metaphor and metonymy play a significant role in determining the meaning of compounds. Finally, the research hypothesis, the existence of independent subschemas and the hierarchical construction in the mentioned word-formation patterns was rejected, because compounds of “cheshm” are considered only as instances of objective instantiations derived from the most abstract constructional schemas of compounding, namely [N-X]A, [X-N]A and [N-N]N, and not derived from the word-formation subschemas consisting of "cheshm".
Hadaegh Rezaei; Adel Rafi; Mojtaba Pordel
Abstract
Extended abstract
1- Introduction
From a philosophical perspective, one could say that during the history of literary criticism within the twentieth century, there have been two principal views on the nature of literary texts: One considers literary works as self-contained esthetic objects, which ...
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Extended abstract
1- Introduction
From a philosophical perspective, one could say that during the history of literary criticism within the twentieth century, there have been two principal views on the nature of literary texts: One considers literary works as self-contained esthetic objects, which ambiguity, indeterminacy and uncertainty constitute an indispensable part of them; the other seeks to examine literary works as to reveal a single specific reading which represents historical consciousness in its different aspects, political, social and so on and so forth. Among various literary criticisms, cognitive poetics belongs to the first attitude to literary works, as it does not intend, by reducing literary texts to the historical, political and/or social context, to obtain one single interpretation. Rather, cognitive poetics, by describing the cognitive operations involved in the process of reading which experienced readers trigger in their mind while confronting literary texts, aims to study how different interpretations of one single literary text are formed. The formation of interpretations by readers is a cognitive operation which takes place through the unpacking of the text and recombining it into a meaningful integrated whole.
2- Theoretical Framework and Methodology:
The present article, in a descriptive and analytic manner, and within the framework of cognitive poetics, aims at a study of one poem by one of the Persian blank-verse poets through an analysis of the possibilities this framework could provide for the fact that how literary works are interpreted by different readers. The theory, which is thus put into practice from within the cognitive poetics framework, is called the conceptual blending theory put forward by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). Generally speaking, according to this cognitive theory of meaning construction, every poetic text could be considered as a conceptual blend, or a set of conceptual blends, which is created through a number of cognitive processes such as selective projection, mapping, compression, decompression, as well as the construction of networks called integration networks. And for a reader to reach a particular interpretation among the possible interpretations, it is necessary for him to repeat all these cognitive operations again in his own right in the mind. Difference in the reconstruction of the integration networks operating behind the conceptual blends, and also in the cognitive operations which lead to the reconstruction of the Integration Networks, brings about different interpretations of one and the same text. It turns out that the conceptual blending theory, taken in conjunction with some elements from another theory within the cognitive poetics framework, namely the conceptual domain theory proposed by Ronald Langacker (1987), provides a powerful theoretical tool for the description and explanation of how different readings of one and the same text emerge. Furthermore, the conceptual blending theory offers another instrument, called optimalty principles, which can be used to assess the extent to which one particular interpretation enjoys a well-formed semantic structure, a theoretical tool that could also provide reasons for preference of one reading over the other.
3- Results and Discussions:
The analysis of the selected poem, through the application of the theoretical instruments provided by the conceptual blending theory, theoretical instruments such as schema induction, vital relationships and their different kinds of compressions, together with the exploitation of a number of concepts taken from Langacker's conceptual domains theory like profiling, demonstrate that how and through what cognitive operations readers construct different meanings of one and the same text. Thus, during the process of meaning construction, through the operation of one particular cognitive function or the omission of it (for example, compression of vital relationships or selective projection of different conceptual structures), readers may reach different interpretations of the same text. In general, the possible interpretations of the poem selected for analysis in this inquiry can be subsumed under two categories: Those interpretations that occur within the conceptual domain of love. In each one of these readings, it is the conceptual domain of love that is activated from the long-term memory into the working memory, only that in each case a different part of the complex, intertwined network of the conceptual domain of love is profiled. In these interpretations, according to the readings the experimental readers have provided the researchers with, three patterns can be distinguished, which may designated as "modest", "boastful" and "passionate" or "romantic". The interpretations of the other category, instead of the conceptual domain of love, activate other ones, and thus are potentially infinite.
4- Conclusions and Suggestions:
To conclude, the conceptual blending theory, in a sense, can be regarded as the cognitivist account of the poststructuralist theory of unlimited interpretation, providing the relativist notion of reading with a description and explanation which are based upon empirical data. In addition, the present research demonstrates that poetic texts are capable of ambiguity, polyphony and the possibility of different, even contradictory interpretations, and since the selected poem displays these features, it acquires one important criterion of poeticality. In addition, although the conceptual blending theory allows different interpretations of the same text, by applying its optimality principles, it chooses some of them over the others as optimal readings, and does not give all of them the same credit.
