The Polysemy of Suffix “-i”: An Exploration within the Construction Morphology

The purpose of the present research is to analyze one of the most frequently used derivational suffixes in Persian, namely “-i“, and to examine its various structural and semantic/functional aspects. The study adopts a construction-based approach and, using a descriptive-analytical method, tries to explain the word formation patterns using the notions of “construction” and “constructional schemas” within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010, 2015). It then represents the hierarchical and network relationships among constructional schemas and subschemas in a systematic way. The data under study are extracted from the authors own morphological corpus which includes more than 8000 derivational and compound words as well as Farhang-e Bozorg-e Sokhan (The Great Sokhan Dictionary) (Anvari, 2002). The findings of the research show that “-i” has 38 different meanings/functions and thus we can consider this affix an extremely polysemous one which is always susceptible to new meanings/functions. This polysemy is not explainable at the level of words but at the level of abstract schemas, and therefore is called “constructional polysemy”. In other words, Construction Morphology theory brings us to a new conception of polysemy: a hierarchical and multi-level polysemy at the level of abstract constructions of language.