The Study of Compounding in Persian Based on Natural Morphology

Natural morphology is one of the natural linguistic approaches.Naturalness is one of the key concepts in this field which does not amount to repetition or simplicity. It is a basic principle in linguistic approaches and is based on empirical evidences.Naturalists believed that a morphological process or construction is natural when having a wide distribution or being acquired sooner in the language learning process or showing resistance to language change or being the latest element forgotten in language aphasia. Naturalness of process and construction is in opposite relation with markedness i.e. the more unmarked is the morphological process, the less natural it is and vice versa. In this paper the structure of compound nouns,adjectives and verbs have been examined based on criteria of natural morphology. The paper has two main sections including:compounding process in Persian and the study of compound nouns, adjectives and verbs based on natural morphology.