The present article is a case study that aims at investigating the morphology of Persian compound and derived occupation nouns from a cognitive-constructional view. Affixation and compounding are two major Persian word-formation processes through which Persian occupation nouns are made. Some of the most frequently used suffixes involved in their formation are “-gær”, “-kɑr”, “-dɑr”, “-bɑn”,
... [Show full abstract] “-ʧi”, “-mænd” (added to nouns) and “-ænde” (added to present verb stems) and the two main compounding processes include adding a noun to present verb stem, such as “mojæsæme-sɑz” (sculpture-make “sculptor”) and adding a modifier noun to another occupation name, such “dændɑn-pezeʃk” (tooth-doctor “dentist”). The data are from two online corpora, Takvaj (http://takvaj.ir/) and Bijankhan (http://ece.ut.ac.ir/dbrg/bijankhan/), supplemented with a data-base generated by the authors and analyzed based on Langacker’s (1987, 2008) Cognitive Grammar (CG) with a focus on the notion of “construal” and considering its four classes of specificity, focusing, prominence and perspective. The very fundamental notions of categorization and conceptualization are also taken into account. Furthermore, we try to link the Cognitive Grammar approach to that of Construction Morphology (CM) (Booij, 2010, 2015) and argue that construal could be considered a property of morphological constructions. That is, each constructional schema (or subschema) construes the reality of the world in a specific way.
By doing this, we try to provide answers to the following questions: What is the outcome of analyzing Persian derived and compound occupation nouns through the use of the fundamental notions of Cognitive Grammar? How can we integrate the notion of “construal” with the constructional schemas in CM? The study shows that the integration of CG with CM could provide a deeper account of the occupation nouns in Persian and reveal the construal phenomena that seem to play main role in formation of these complex words.
