Adjectives’ order in Persian

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 (PhD), Buali Sinā University

2 MA in General Linguistics at Buali Sinā University

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the question of which factors govern the adjective order (AO) in Persian. To do so, 3136 adjectives were used based on written-spoken corpus. The variables were length, nouniness, semantic closeness, non-comparability, Dixon`s semantic classes, Subjectivity-objectivity gradience, semantic congruity and affective load, corpus-specific frequency and frequency.
Data analysis showed that all of the factors except Dixon`s semantic classes had impact on AO. To determine the effect size of each variable, multifactorial analysis was done. The results showed that the phonological variable is the most important variable for predicting the AO. The pragmatic one including corpus-specific frequency was at second level of importance. And the third level had been devoted to the semantic variables including semantic congruity, affective load and subjectivity-objectivity gradience. At last, the prediction power of the analysis was 63%. In fact, using given variables we could predict up to 63% of the AO.

Keywords

References

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Persian Language and Iranian Dialects
Volume 2, Issue 1 - Serial Number 3
Serial 3
July 2017
Pages 7-21

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