Polysemy of Persian Verbs of Hearing: A Cognitive, Corpus-Based and Diachronic Approach

This study is performed using a library-based method, in which a list of different meanings of hearing verbs was provided and later classified to meaning labels. The next step was to extract examples from Persian Language Data Base (PLDB), which is a 100 million word corpus of Persian texts. According to the contemporary corpus, there are 11 meanings for /ʃeniːdæn/, 6 meanings for /ʃenoftæn/, 3 meanings for /ɡuːʃ dadæn/, 4 meanings for /ɡuːʃ kærdæn/ and 5 meanings for /ni:juʃi:dæn/. Based on the historical corpus, there are 11 meanings for / ʃeniːdæn/, 1 for /ʃenoftæn/, 2 for /ɡuːʃ dadæn/, 2 for /ɡuːʃ kærdæn/ and 2 meanings for /ni:juʃi:dæn/.Using the meaning frequencies, resulting from the meanings in their context, made it possible to draw the semantic network for “to hear” and “to listen”. The results obtained from this study can make possible the cross-linguistic comparison of meanings of hearing verbs in similar research conducted on other languages and be used in lexicography and teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers.