A Construction Morphology Approach to the Analysis of Compound Adjectives Made of Sāz (Builder) in Persian

In the present study, we attempted to specify the constructional schemas relevant to the compounds made by the present stem ‘sāz’ in Persian within the framework of the construction morphology (Booij, 2010). To this end, 150 compounds were brought together from numerous sources, such as the Persian Corpus of Bijankhan, Persian novels as well as some Persian websites. Having collected the data, we tabulated and categorized them on the basis of the preverbal elements. Afterwards, a comparison was made, as a result of which it was indicated that there can be a general constructional schema inside which 5 sub-schemas can be placed. Certainly, the broad schema denotes the construction by which a noun (preverbal element) is combined with the verbal element (present stem sāz) to create an adjective that implies the agent of an action, namely the agent of building or making an object. However, there were two exceptions among the whole dataset: a compound in spite of resembling the other compounds regarding its construction denotes the semantic role of patient: dastsāz (handmade), referring to an object which is made by hands as well as the compound ʤāsāz (embedded object), whereas in other compounds, the stem means the agent that builds, creates or makes. Consequently, as might be expected, two broad constructional schemas have been obtained: one relevant to the agents and the other relevant to patients.