All languages in the world use different mechanisms to create new words. compounding is a morphological process whose main function is the formation of new word-forms. In Persian, compounding is the most productive morphological process. One of the compound words is numeral; a numeral in the broadest sense is a word or phrase that describes a numerical quantity.  The main purpose of this research is to study the compound numeral construction [Num X] in Persian within the framework of Construction Morphology (CM) to investigate its semantic variations, the most general schema and subschemas. The data analyzed in this study has been gathered from six sources: Reverse Dictionary (Zansu) (Keshani, 1993), Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB), FarsNet, Farhang-e Bozorg-e Sokhan (Anvari, 2002), Google and Persian Wikipedia. The findings of the research show that [Num X] has different meanings (functions) and thus we can consider it as a polysemous construct. Its polysemy is not explainable at the level of words, but at the level of abstract schemas; hence, it is called “constructional/ logical polysemy”. The results of this study indicate that “distinctive property of an entity related to SEM Number and X” is the prototypical meaning of [Num X] which is the most abstract correlation among meaning and form in Persian language.

Keywords: Compounding, Number, Construction Morphology, Constructional Schema, Constructional Polysemy.

     

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