Aspect in Synthetic Compounds: A Corpus-based study

In the present study, grammatical and lexical aspects and their types were studied in synthetic compounds of modern Persian. The research data was derived from the dissertation of Ghonchepour (2014) and includes 8579 synthetic compound words taken from Farhang-i-buzurg-i soxan (Anvari, 2007). The study of this corpus showed that grammatical and lexical aspects which have been reported in verbs and sentences are observed in synthetic compound words. The internal structure of Persian synthetic compound words showed time range and action or state phases of doing. Grammatical aspect in synthetic compound words is of two perfective and imperfective types. The perfective aspect includes the persistence, non-persistence, resultative and experiential types. Iterative, habitual and progressive aspects are subtypes of imperfective aspect. Based on [±durative], [±dynamic], [±scalar] and [±telic] features, two stative and dynamic synthetic compound nouns in Persian were differentiated. The dynamic lexical aspect includes non-scalar (action and semelfactive) and scalar categories. The scalar aspect was also classified into closed (two-point and multi-point) and open types.