The Study of Compounding Process and Its Classification in terms of Meaning and Relationship between Constituents in Mazandarani

As a branch of morphology and a mechanism of word-formation and due to its high frequency and productivity, compounding has received considerable attention by many linguists. However, it has not yet been studied in Mazandarani. In the present study, Mazandarani compounds taken from Tabari dictionary have been analyzed semantically and in terms of the relationship between their constituents. Based on Bisetto and Scalise’s categorization as the theoretical framework of the study, compounds are classified into three major groups, namely, coordination, attributive and subordinative. Regarding the relationship between the constituents, compounds are divided into verbal and non-verbal ones. Verbal compounds and their classifications are the main focus of the present study. A verbal compound is a type of subordinative one in whose construction, the non-verbal constituent is the complement of the verbal constituent. Semantically verbal compounds are classified into four groups including argument, non-argument, reduplicative, and phrasal ones. The evidence shows that there is almost a complete correspondence between Mazandarani and the classification suggested by Bisetto and Scalise.
 
1. Introduction
Contemporary Iranian languages and dialects are the remaining of the Proto-Iranian language which was highly related to Proto-Indo-Aryan language. Their ancestor was Proto-Indo-European language. Iranian languages constitute the western branch of Indo-Iranian languages group. Proto-Indo-Iranian language itself is a branch of Proto-Indo-European language (Dabir Moghaddam, 2014:93-94). Mazandarani is from Indo-European family and is a branch of Indo-Iranian languages and comes from Iranian languages group (Bashirnezhad, 2013:11). Morphology plays two basic roles, inflection and word-formation (Bauer, 1983:34). Word-formation is accomplished through derivation and compounding. Compounding is one of the productive processes of word-formation among languages in the world. Due to its productivity, it has received considerable attention by many Iranian and non-Iranian scholars. Among Iranian scholars, we can refer to Kalbasi (1992), Sameɂei (1996), Tabatabaee (2003), Sadeghi (2004), Khabbaz (2007), Shaghaghi (2007) and Ghonchepur (2013). Among non-Iranian scholars, we can mention Williams (1981), Selkirk (1982), Jensen (1990), Katamba (1993), Faab (1998), Spencer (2000), Haspelmath (2002), Bisetto and Scalise (2005) and Lieber(2010). However, this productive process has not yet been studied in Mazandarani. The present research attempts to analyze Mazandarani compounds taken from Tabari dictionary (Nasri Ashrafi: 2002), semantically and in terms of the relationship between the constituents.
 
2. Theoretical framework
In the last decades, numerous studies have been conducted with regard to compounding process and its different types by distinguished linguists around the world. For example, Bloomfield (1933), Marchand (1969), Spencer (1991), Faab (1998), Olsen (2001), Bauer (2001), Haspelmath (2002), and Boij (2005), have suggested different classifications regarding compounds. Having discussed the inadequacies of the classifications offered by others, Bisetto and Scalise (2005) have introduced their own categorization which they consider as the most complete one. According to Ghonchehpur (2013), their categorization is the only one which is universally accepted and valid. In the present research, for the classification of verbal compounds Bisetto and Scalise (2005), and for the distinction and determination of syntactic, semantic and morphological heads, the criteria offered by Liber (2009) have been taken into consideration.
 
3. Methodology
The data of the present study are taken from Tabari dictionary (Nasri Ashrafi 2002) amounting to 8025 compounds. It is worth mentioning that the present researcher who is a Mazandarani native speaker has collected a number of compounds not listed in Tabari dictionary. Including a corpus data approximately amounting to 8300 compounds. To select the sample, we referred to Kerjecie-Morgan table. Based on it, if the subjects (here compounds) are below 10000, the sample could be 384. However, in order to increase the measurement accuracy, we increased the sample to 2000 compounds. In the present study, which is a theoretical one, a descriptive analytical method has been used for the analysis and interpretation of the data. Therefore, the sample of compounds have been analyzed in the form of a table and based on such criteria as syntactic category, semantic classification of compound types (endocentric, exocentric and coordinate) the position of head and being verbal or non-verbal.
 
4. Results & Discussion
As an important process of word-formation and due to its high frequency and productivity, compounding has received considerable attention by many linguists. In the present study, Mazandarani compounds taken from Tabari dictionary have been analyzed semantically and in terms of the relationship between their constituents. Based on Bisetto and Scalise’s categorization as the theoretical framework of the study, Mazandarani compounds are classified into three major groups, namely, coordinate, attributive and subordinative. Regarding the relationship between the constituents, they are divided into verbal and non-verbal ones. A verbal compound is a type of subordinative compound in whose construction; the non-verbal constituent is the complement of the verbal constituent. In other words, in the construction of verbal compounds, the constituent derived from a verb is the syntactic head. However, in non-verbal compounds the constituents derived from a verb is not the syntactic head. Verbal compounds in turn are divided into compounds having specific syntactic head and non-specific syntactic head. Semantically verbal compounds are classified into four groups including argument, non-argument, reduplicative, and phrasal ones.
 
5. Conclusions & Suggestions
Verbal compounds and their classifications were the main focus of the present study. It was shown that in verbal compounds, the syntactic head is a noun, an adjective or an adverb derived from a verb. It was also shown that there was almost a complete correspondence between Mazandarani and the classification suggested by Bisetto and Scalise. Furthermore, an important point which received special attention in the present research was the distribution of semantic, syntactic and morphological heads in a particular compound. In other words, there is no equal distribution among them in different compounds. However, there is an overlap among them just in head last/final endocentric verbal compounds in the sense that the same constituent simultaneously plays the role of all three heads. In exocentric verbal compounds, neither constituent functions as the semantic head. However, they have a syntactic head. In coordinate compounds, it is not easy to distinguish which constituent determines the syntactic category of the whole compound since both constituents are of the same category. In addition, the meaning of the whole compound is the sum of the meanings of its constituents.
The goal of the present research was to study compounding process especially verbal compounds and their classifications in Mazandarani. However, there are some issues like non-verbal compounds, compound verbs and incorporation in Mazandarani which require further research. Furthermore, the above mentioned topics as well as verbal compounds can be studied within the framework of other morphological theories such as lexeme-based morphology, distributed morphology and cognitive morphology.
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