دانشگاه تربیت مدرس جستارهای زبانی 2322-3081 مقالات آماده انتشار 2025 07 13 An Investigation into the Semantic Shift in English-Persian Compound Verbs An Investigation into the Semantic Shift in English-Persian Compound Verbs 7205 10.48311/lrr.2025.7205 FA T Nushi Shahid Beheshti University Zahra Abolhassani Chimeh The University of Tehran Journal Article 2025 07 13 Given the status of English as the world lingua franca, speakers of many world languages are increasingly coming into contact with the language and incorporate features of the English language into their own native languages. The influence has been made more diffusive by the emergence of and rapid growth in technological innovations, especially the social media. Persian has borrowed a variety of English lexical words, prompting this study to explore a set of such borrowed words that have been integrated into the Persian language. These loanwords were subsequently combined with the host grammatical elements to create innovative compound verbs. In the majority of instances, the borrowed English constituents in these verbs have distinctly different meanings from their original English counterparts. This research examines the type of the semantic change that has occurred in the English words after they were borrowed into Persian and how frequent each type of change is. Hollmann's (2009) taxonomy of semantic change was utilized to achieve the purposes of this research. The results revealed that the most frequent semantic shift was through metaphor, with semantic narrowing and pejoration being the second and third most frequent types of semantic change. The least frequent types of semantic change were metonymy, broadening, and melioration. Given the status of English as the world lingua franca, speakers of many world languages are increasingly coming into contact with the language and incorporate features of the English language into their own native languages. The influence has been made more diffusive by the emergence of and rapid growth in technological innovations, especially the social media. Persian has borrowed a variety of English lexical words, prompting this study to explore a set of such borrowed words that have been integrated into the Persian language. These loanwords were subsequently combined with the host grammatical elements to create innovative compound verbs. In the majority of instances, the borrowed English constituents in these verbs have distinctly different meanings from their original English counterparts. This research examines the type of the semantic change that has occurred in the English words after they were borrowed into Persian and how frequent each type of change is. Hollmann's (2009) taxonomy of semantic change was utilized to achieve the purposes of this research. The results revealed that the most frequent semantic shift was through metaphor, with semantic narrowing and pejoration being the second and third most frequent types of semantic change. The least frequent types of semantic change were metonymy, broadening, and melioration.