Study and Comparison of Highly-frequent Compounds Structure in Persian on the Basis of Word-based Morphology and Morpheme-based Morphology

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of Linguistics, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language Teaching and Translation, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Karaj, Iran

3 Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

4 Professor of Linguistics, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Word-based and morpheme-based morphology are highly considered by morphologists. Researchers such as Selkirk (1982) and Lieber (1992) have considered Morpheme-based morphology and researchers such as Aronoff (1976) and Bochner (1993) have considered word-based morphology. Two syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes are used for word-formation in morpheme-based and word-based approaches, respectively. Based on Aronoff, in word-based morphology, “a new word is formed by applying a regular rule to a single already existing word”, and so both words belong to major lexical categories. But In morpheme-based approach, morphemes have a fundamental role in word-creation. This research aimed to investigate highly-frequent compound words based on Aronoff (1976) and Lieber (1992) theories. For this goal, 1000 first highly-frequent compound words in Persian Language were extracted from Persian Language database and the formation of each word investigated in terms of both approaches. The results showed that 85.4% of compound words in Persian are consistent with both approaches and 14.6% are consistent with word-based approach. However, in the data examined even one compound word was not found that could be justified only by a morpheme - based approach.

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