Persian Agent Nouns Derived from –gar: A Construction Morphology Approach

In this paper, the authors deal with polysemy of a Persian suffix, –gar, its development, and some non-compositional aspects of meanings of the words derived from it. –gar is a productive agentive suffix in Persian deriving deverbal/denominal agent nouns and adjectives. The polysemous derived agent nouns are categorized as human agent nouns, human agent nouns denoting an occupation and non-human agent nouns (instruments). We investigate this polysemy in the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010). Construction Morphology provides a framework for proper account of word formation processes, in particular derivation, by employing a lexeme-based approach and by considering some morphological schemas/constructions in word formation.
Present analysis is based on a data set extracted from diachronic and synchronic corpora. First, a collection of 124 words derived from –gar was extracted from two dictionaries of Sokhan and Zansou (a Persian reveres dictionary) as well as from Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB). Present work also takes into account a diachronic perspective by searching the collected non-human agent nouns (instruments) in the diachronic corpus of Farhanyar, which contains literary works spanning from 9th century up to the present century and is the only diachronic corpus in Persian. The collected nouns were subsequently assigned to different categories of general human agents, human agents denoting a job, and non-human agents (instruments) based on their semantic variations. Meaning of ‘human agent of a regular and distinguished action related to the meaning of the base’ was assigned to [x-gar] construction as a prototypical meaning and a starting point for the ramification. The authors propose here that the development of instrument sub-schema- as a recent development in function of gar- is due to the influence of English loan words derived from –er. It seems that the mechanism behind this development is approximation i.e. the metaphoric extension at patterns level and not at the words level. The authors also argue that words with meanings of job and non-job agentive nouns are derived from two independent sub-schemas