Extension of the meaning and physical context of vehicle terms to everyday Persian vocabulary and vice versa

Document Type : Original Article

Author

. Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of English, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran

Abstract

Many Persian terms and expressions realated to vehicles have undergone extension of the meaning and physical context. The corpus under study includes vehicle terms that have entered everyday vocabulary as well as everyday words and expressions that have been added to vehicle terms through extension of the meaning and physical context. Identifying whether a word or an expression has undergone extension of meaning and physical context is based on the linguistic intuition of the author as a native speaker of Persian. This research presents several examples and discusses them within the framework of Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). In line with this theory, there exists a combination of knowledge, experiences and shared background information about vehicle-realated terms in the mind of every Persian speaker. Using this combination, not only Persian speakers are aware of their original meanings and physical contexts but also they have access to their extended meanings and/ or physical contexts. In accordance with the Relevance theory, when a Persian speaker hears a vehicle-realated term s/he considers the physical context to evaluate it and then matches it with her/his background knowledge in order to figure out if the speaker intended its original meaning or its extended meaning.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics