A Cognitive and Non-cognitive Study of the Ezafe Construction in Persian

This paper investigates the Ezafe construction in Persian based on the cognitive and non-cognitive approaches. After providing a short review of the issue from traditional and formal perspectives، the current paper tackles the issue primarily on the basis of cognitive linguistics، namely construction grammar. The Ezafe construction in Persian consists of a number of constructional meanings on which inheritance links dominate. Inheritance links are defined as metaphorization process in which a complex-abstract structure is derived from a basic-concrete concept. This paper is، however، focused on the basic structure of Ezafe and its derivations in Persian. Furthermore، for the analysis of semantic expansion of Ezafe the through metaphorization، we will also provide some diachronic analysis to detect its possible original and prototypical meaning. At end، we represent the Ezafe diagram based on inheritance links among the basic structure and its derivations، having taken some advantages of some cognitive principles like scene encoding and profile hypothesis. The findings of this research take an action to establish the metaphorization process in which the basic structure plays a critical role in constructing the subsequent-complex ones.