The Superlative Comparison Schemas in Persian

The present paper aims to investigate the superlative comparison schemas and to capture the way this grammatical notion is encoded linguistically in Persian based on Heine’s (1997) cognitive approach. To this end, all comparative constructions involving the notion of superlative comparison were collected as our data through a comprehensive search of the Colloquial Persian Dictionary by Najafi (2008). The research hypothesis is that Heine’s proposed model cannot account for the Persian data. The results of the study showed that in Persian, five more schemas, namely the Linking, the Possession, the Equation, the Body part, the Idiomatic schemas and three more subschemas, as well as some schema blends encoded the superlative notion, in addition to the eight schemas listed in Heine’s. Furthermore, it seemed that some schemas (subschemas), especially the Linking schema, were specific to Persian and they had not been documented in Heine's approach. Moreover, the formal expression of the degree marker, the marker of standard, and the standard was not obligatory and, in such cases, the superlative comparative meaning was encoded by an element that combined the meaning of these elements together in some way or other. Finally, our hypothesis was confirmed and the study ended with a suggestion to modify Hein's schema list to account for the Persian data.