Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Institute for Cognitive Science Studies
2 Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies
3 Academy of Persian Language and Literature
Abstract
The present study aims at studying preposition /az/ “from” in textbooks of primary school level. Polysemy of prepositions is one of the sources of many students’ perception. In the current research, we use a text corpus developed from the Farsi, Practical Science, Heavenly Gifts, and Social Studies of elementary school textbooks grades 1 to 6. The data analysis inspires to use Rosh prototype theory (1975) and Tyler and Evans (2003) systematic prepositions polysemy approaches in the cognitive semantics framework. In this research at first, we extracted the sample sentences which contained the preposition /az/ “from” to develop the sub-corpus. The set of senses that are obtained from the sub-corpus, contain “Type”, “Whole Part”, “Tense. Source”, “Comparation”, “with the help of, By, With”, “About”, “Orientation”, “Motion”, “Metaphor”, and “Complement”. Statistical distribution of meanings in the whole sub-corpus (general domain) was “Whole part”. The senses of the proposition among lessons and grades (domain restricted) are not similar to the prototype sense. This research shows that the sense “Complement” is the prototype for grades 1 to 3, and the sense “Whole Part” is more frequent in grade 4 to 6. Different forms of this preposition are used at the beginning, middle, and end of the sentence. Furthermore, the findings show that the sense “Metaphor” is the prototype for the lesson Farsi, the sense “Whole Part” is the prototype sense for Practical Science and Social Studies, and the sense “Tense” is the prototype sense for Heavenly Gifts.
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