Selectional Restrictions on the Derivational Persian Suffix «-انه»/-ɑne/

Abstract

This paper tends to study selectional restrictions on the Persian suffix «-انه». Selectional restrictions which have been dealt with include grammatical, morphological, phonological and semantic constraints and pragmatic restrictions including useful neologism, necessity of labeling and aesthetic constraints. Words derived from the suffix «-انه» have been extracted from Zansoo dictionary. For deleting old words from the data they have been double checked in Sadri Afshar’s contemporary dictionary. Hence the data used by current Persian speakers were well in hand to seek for selectional restrictions. On our way to attain grammatical and semantic constraints, categories and subcategories of bases and derived words are presented via investigating the actual data in hand. In order to get access to other constraints, 50 grammatically and semantically appropriate bases which do not attach to the selected affixes and do not form acceptable words have been extracted from the dictionary of Sadri Afshar and have been investigated along with the actual derived words which were gathered earlier from Zansoo and Sadri Afshar’s dictionaries. Thus by comparing the actual words which are in use and the possible but non existing word forms, other selectional restrictions including phonological, morphological, useful neologism, necessity of labeling and aesthetic constraints have been presented for each suffix.