Argument Structure of the Persian Perception verb “didæn”: Goldberg's Construction Grammar Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Ph.D. Student of Linguistics, Department of English Language, Abadeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Abadeh, Iran

2 Corresponding Author, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language, Abadeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Abadeh, Iran

3 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language, Abadeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Abadeh, Iran

Abstract

Perception verbs as important category of verbs are used to represent perceptual events related to human and other conscious creatures. This article examines the argument structure of the most important perception verb in Persian, i.e. “didæn’ (to see), within the framework of Goldberg's Construction Grammar (1995, 2006). The data includes a collection of 500 Persian sentences extracted from the Hamshahri corpus. The results show that the subject of “didæn’, semantically, plays the role of senser and its object plays the role of phenomenon that sometimes appears as a nominal phrase and sometimes as a subordinate clause. The verb "didæn" has a high degree of polysemy and in this study 17 different meanings have been detected. In each meaning, the argument structure differs in terms of formal or semantic properties of the object and/or the number of complements. Therefore, it can be argued that, in contrast to the projectionist approach, the argument structure of “didæn” is not dependent to the verb itself, but to a particular construction in which the verb occurs. This conclusion is in line with the constructionist approach that posits that a construction by itself has independent form and meaning.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

سدالهی، خدابخش و الهه شاه‌حسینی (1395). بررسی معنی‌شناختی فعل «دیدن» در دیوان حافظ. مجموعه مقالات یازدهمین گردهمایی انجمن ترویج زبان و ادب فارسی ایران، 11، 654-672.
افراشی، آزیتا و ساناز عسگری (1396). چندمعنایی فعل حسی «دیدن» در زبان فارسی: پژوهشی شناختی و پیکره‌ای. پژوهش‌های زبان‌شناسی تطبیقی، 7 (2)، 61-73.
حضرتی، یوسف؛ فاطمه یوسفی‌راد؛ بلقیس روشن و محمدرضا احمدخانی (1394). بررسی چندمعنایی در زبان ترکی آذربایجانی در چارچوب معنی‌شناسی شناختی: فعل دیداری görmǝk (دیدن). پژوهش‌های زبا‌‌ن‌شناختی در زبان‌های خارجی، 5 (2)، 243-269.
عسگری، ساناز (1394). تحلیل چندمعنایی فعل حسی دیدن در زبان فارسی: پژوهشی شناختی و پیکره‌ای. پایان‌نامۀ کارشناسی ارشد، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی واحد تهران مرکزی.
قادری، مهدی؛ فاطمه یوسفی‌راد؛ آزیتا افراشی و بلقیس روشن (1398). چندمعنایی نظام‌مند در رویکرد شناختی، تحلیل چندمعنایی فعل حسی دیدن در زبان فارسی. مطالعات زبان‌ها و گویش‌های غرب ایران، 27، 73-92.
کریمی‌دوستان، غلامحسین (1379). برخی ترکیبات و اشتقاقات فارسی و نظریۀ ساخت موضوعی. مجلۀ علوم اجتماعی و انسانی دانشگاه شیراز، 15-16 (1 و2)، 193-201.
موسوی، سیدحمزه؛ والی رضایی و محمد عموزاده (1394). بررسی واژۀ «دیدن» از منظر معنا‌شناسی‌ قالبی. جستارهای زبانی، 6 (7)، 219-236.
References
Åfarli, T.A. (2007). Do verbs have argument structure? In E. Reuland, T. Bhattacharya & G. Spathas (eds.), Argument Structure (pp. 1-16). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Afrashi, A. & Asgari, S. (2018). Polysemy of perception verb “to see” [didan] in Persian: A cognitive and corpus-based study. Comparative Linguistic Research, 7 (2), 61-73 (In Persian).
Antuñano, I. I. (1999). Polysemy and Metaphor in Perception Verbs: A Cross-Linguistic Study. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh.
Antuñano, I. I. (2002). Mind-as-body as a cross-linguistic conceptual metaphor. Miscelánea. A Journal of English and American Studies, (25), 93-119.
Asadollahi, Kh. & Shahhosseini, E. (2016). A Semantic Analysis of ‘to see’ (didan) in Hafiz Poetry. Proceeding of 11th symposium of Persian language and literature Society, 11, 654-672 (In Persian).
Asgari, S. (2016). Analysis of the polysemy of perception verb “to see” [didan] in Persian: A cognitive and corpus-based study. M.A. Thesis, Islamic Azad University, Central Tehran Branch (In Persian).
Bencini, G.M.L. & A.Ε. Goldberg (2000). The Contribution of Argument Structure Constructions to Sentence Meaning. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 640-651.
Borer, H. (2003). Exo-skeletal vs. endo-skeletal explanations: Syntactic projections and the lexicon. In J. Moore & M. Polinsky (eds), The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory (pp. 31–67). Stanford: CSLI.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fillmore, C. J. & P. Kay (1993). Construction Grammar. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Berkeley.
Ghaderi, M., Yousefirad, F., Afrashi, A. & Rowshan, B. (2019). Systematic Polysemy in Cognitive Approach: Studying the Polysemy of “see” in Persain. Journal of Western Iranian Languages and Dialects, 4 (7), 73-91 (In Persian).
Gisborne, N. (2010). The Event Structure of Perception Verbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at Work: the Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, A.E. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and perception. Belmont, CA: Wads worth, Cengage Learning.
Haegeman, L. (1994). Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Halliday, M.A.K., & C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Routledge.
Hazrati, Y., Yousefirad, F., Rowshan, B. & Ahmadkhani, M.R. (2015). The study of polysemy in Azerbaijani Turkish in the framework of cognitive semantics: visual verb /görmǝk/ (seeing). Foreign Language Research Journal, 5 (2), 243-269 (In Persian).
Jackendoff, R. S. (1990) Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Karimi-Doostan, Gh. (2000). Some Persian Compounds and Derivatives and Argument Structure Theory. Journal of Social Science and Humanities of Shiraz University, 15-16 (1-2), 193-201 (In Persian).
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Mousavi, S. H., Amoozadeh, M. & Rezai, V. (2016). Analysis of the Word ‘Didan’ Based on Frame Semantics. Language Related Research, 6 (7), 219-236 (In Persian).
Neagu, M. (2013). What is universal and what is language specific in the polysemy of perception verbs, Revue Roumaine de Linguistique LVIII 3, 329–343.
Nolan, B. (2013). Constructional polysemy and argument realisation with the Irish GET verb. in E. van Gelderen, J. Barðdal & M. Cennamo (eds.), Argument Structure in Flux (pp. 87-116). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Perek, F. (2015). Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ramonda, K. (2014). Goldberg’s Construction Grammar. In J. Littlemore & J.R. Taylor (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 60-71). London: Bloomsbury.
Strenberg, R.J. (2006). Cognitive psychology. California: Thomson Wadsworth.
Viberg, Å. (2008). Swedish verbs of perception from a typological and contrastive perspective. In M.A. Gómez-González, J.L. Mackenzie & E.M. Álvarez, (Eds.), Languages and cultures in contrast and comparison (pp. 123-172). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics