A Comparative Study of Word Formation in Persian & Arabic; Derivation, Compounding & Semantic Shift

زبان و ادبیات عربی

Article 2, Volume 5, Issue 9, July 2013, Pages 1-22   

Document Type: research article

DOI: 10.22067/jall.v5i9.37326

Authors

Edris Amini^* ; Abolhasan Amin Moghaddasi

Abstract

Persian and Arabic have had long-lasting religious and cultural symbiosis. Due to their speakers’ similar cultural conditions and geographical proximity, the two languages have lived a long time near each other, have grown together and enriched each other. The authors of this article studied the word formation processes in the two languages and showed the capabilities and limitations of each of these two languages in dynamicity and productivity. The study has scrutinized derivation, compounding and semantic change in words as three main common mechanisms of word formation in the two languages. The results show that although compared to Arabic, fewer texts have been written in Persian and the language has had a passive stance to Arabic, the well-developed derivational and compound structure Persian has served the productivity of the language during the last century and a wide range of new words have found their way to the vocabulary of the mass reservoir of Persian vocabulary. In contrast, the templatic nature of derivation in Arabic, peculiar to the language, brings about certain constraints in the production of compound words that are part of the lexicon of every living language.

Keywords

word formation; derivation; compounding; semantic change