A Typological Study of Superlative Comparison in Persian
Journal Title: Journal of Researches in Linguistics - Year 2021, Vol 13, Issue 1
Abstract
Abstract: This study set out to conduct a typological investigation of “comparative/superlative construction” and analyze the formal and functional differences of the constructive components of this construction in Persian language. To this end, firstly, the most important morpho-syntactic strategies encoding the superlative comparison were identified. Secondly, the formal expressions of the components were examined. Thirdly, the dominant strategy of expressing superlative comparison in Persian was determined based on Stassen’s typological classification (1985) and Nose’s proposed generalization (2010) as the theoretical framework. As with the research methodology, this study was a corpus-based and descriptive-analytic research. The data included 164 sentences collected through a comprehensive search in Colloquial Persian Dictionary written by Najafi (2008). The results showed that the Persian language uses a variety of strategies in term of Ezafe construction, free word order, and a dedicated grammaticalized construction to encode the superlative comparison. Furthermore, the formal expressions of the components of “parameter marker”, “standard marker”, and “standard” are not obligatory and their ordering in the sentences is flexible; however, the formal expressions of “comparee” and “parameter” are optional, except in one case, and they are obligatory in other constructions. Moreover, it was revealed that although the superlative comparative constructions in Persian were mostly of the “Locational” type, Presian used some more constructions or strategies, which were not documented in Stassen and Nose’s proposed models. Finally, the study concluded that Stassen’s typological classification and Nose’s proposed generalization were not adequate enough to explain the Persian data and thus needed to be modified. Keywords: Comparison, Comparative/Superlative Construction, Stassen’s Typological Classification, Nose’s Typological Generalization Introduction Comparison is one of the basic components of human cognition, which is encoded in a variety of ways in the languages of the world. This cognitive concept cannot be described or explained simply by referring to words or morphemes, but its existence depends on some schematic structures. Heine (1997: 109) points out that “the domain of comparison in general and the term “comparative construction” in particular refer to a number of different conceptual and linguistic forms and the main kinds of comparative notions that are commonly distinguished are as follows: 1) positive, 2) equative, 3) superior comparative, 4) inferior comparative, 5) superlative, 6) elative, and 7) excessive.” Among the comparative constructions, "superior comparative" is the prototypical example of comparative constructions in the languages of the world (Heine, 1997: 110). However, Heine (1997), Stassen (1985; 2005), and Haspelmath & Buchholz (1998) all agreed that both "superior comparative" and "superlative" involve the same construction and consist of the same constructive components. In spite of the high frequency and extended use of this notion as one of the main comparative notions in the languages of the world, “superlative comparison” has not been properly considered by Iranian linguists. Our research hypothesis was that there were unknown and language-specific comparative constructions in Persian language due to the existence of some characteristic features and grammatical tools in this language, such as “Ezafe construction”, “free word order”, and other morpho-syntactic items, including constructional idioms, some lexical items, and phrasal/complex predicates, which seemed to be specific to Persian but were not observed in other languages. The present study aimed to answer the following questions: 1) What morpho-syntactic mechanisms do Persian language use to express the superlative comparison? 2) Which components of superlative comparison in Persian have obligatory/optional formal expressions? 3) To what extent Stassen’s typological classification (1985) and Nose’s proposed generalization (2010) can explain the comparative/superlative construction in Persian? 4) Is there any dedicated grammaticalized construction in Persian to express superlative comparison? Materials and Methods This is a corpus-based and descriptive-analytic study. The data includes 164 sentences collected through a comprehensive search in Colloquial Persian Dictionary (Najafi, 2008). The corpus is comprised more than 120 prose works of Modern Persian. These works includes short stories, novels, periodicals, books, and articles. Following a careful and comprehensive search in the mentioned dictionary, all the comparative/superlative constructions have been extracted. Then, the extracted data was then analyzed based on Stassen’s typological classification (1985) and Nose’s (2010) proposed generalization as the theoretical framework. Discussion of Results and conclusions This research was conducted to do a typological analysis of comparative/superlative construction in Persian language based on Stassen’s typological classification (1985) and Nose’s proposed generalization (2010) and the following results were obtained: In response to the first question, the findings showed that the Persian language uses a variety of morpho-syntactic mechanisms, such as reduplication, Ezafe construction, reduplifixation, complex predicates, and some lexical items meaning 'better/superior', constructional idioms, idiomatic expressions, and proverbs. As with the second question, it was revealed that in Persian, the components of "parameter marker" and "standard marker" had no formal expressions in most of the constructions and their presence was optional (out of all, 70% were 3-component or 2-component constructions). Also, the "standard" had no formal expression in some constructions (20% of all the data), which could be identified implicitly and only from the context. Additionally, it was found that only in one construction, the "comparee" could be removed (in 10% of all the data, the “comparee” had no formal expression). Furthermore, benefiting from “Ezafe construction” and free word order in many constructions, the "comparee", the "standard", and the "standard marker" were flexible both in terms of order and the grammatical functions they had in the sentence. In response to the third question, the results indicated that Persian language used some more constructions or strategies, which were not observed and documented in any other languages of the world. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that Stassen’s typological classification and Nose’s proposed generalization were not adequate enough to explain the Persian data and thus needed to be modified. Finally, the results showed that various language-specific constructions were used in Persian to express superlative comparison, including a dedicated grammaticalized construction, which was formed based on the concept of place (directional opposition) through grammaticalization.
Authors and Affiliations
Ava Imani * Assistant professor of Linguistics, Department of General Linguistics, Faculty of Letter and Humanities, Bu-Ali Sina University of Hamedan, Hamedan, Iran ava. imani@basu. ac. ir
Keywords
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- EP ID EP705268
- DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.22108/jrl.2022.130547.1602
- Views 49
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