A Corpus-based Investigation of the Near-synonymy of ‘‘ziyâd and farâvân’’ Size Adjectives according to Behavioral Profile Approach

Investigations show that in Persian no significant research has been done on lexical relationships of size adjectives. In this paper, near-synonymy relationship of ‘‘ziyâd and farâvân’’ size adjectives and their inflectional forms has been studied based on Behavioral Profile Analysis approach of Divjack and Gries (2006) and the data of Hamshahri 2 corpus (Alahmad and et.al, 2009). Accordingly in this study, first, by using AntConc software (2011) the data related to ‘‘ziyâd, ziyâdi, ziyâdtar, ziyâdtarin, ziyâdtari, farâvân, farâvâni, farâvântar, farâvântarin, farâvântari’’ size adjectives were extracted from the corpus and then were annotated on the basis of the morphological, syntactic and semantic features. The result of behavioral profile approach which is acquired according to hierarchical cluster analysis indicated that the highest level of near-synonymy belongs to ‘‘ziyâdi, farâvâni’’, ‘‘ziyâdtari, farâvântari’’, ‘‘ziyâdtar, farâvântar’’, ‘‘ziyâd, farâvân’’ and ‘‘ziyâdtarin, farâvântarin’’ groups and the lowest level of near-synonymy is between ‘‘ziyâdi, farâvâni, ziyâdtari, farâvântari’’ and ‘‘ziyâd, farâvân, ziyâdtarin, farâvântarin, ziyâdtar, farâvântar’’ groups. Finally, annotation analysis based on Z-scores has specified all meaningful and meaningless ID-tags of size adjectives.