Semantic frames of tašxis (“identification”) in Persian: A corpus-based study

Abstract

One of the lexical conceptual relations in language is the polysemy relation by which Finch (2000) and Saeed (2009) mean that a word or lexeme has more than one meaning. In polysemy, out of the polysemous word, multiple meanings are interpreted which are closely related to each other. According to what Richards and Schmidt (1985) define, the semantic units composed of a sequence of events or affairs which are relevant to specific situations evoke their own semantic frames. In fact, a frame is a representation of the context including the sentence in which linguistic items are presented (Matthews, 1997). The concept of Frame was primarily proposed by Fillmore (1977; 1982; 1985) in 1970s. The present research has been done in two phases with the goal of comparing the semantic frames of the word tašxis (Identification) by determining the relationship among them in a way that first the sentences containing it were looked up in the Persian Corpus of Bijankhan. Then, the sentences including tašxis (Identification) were separated from the sentences comprising different inflectional forms of the verb tašxis dādan (to identify). Afterwards, each sentence was converted into its equivalent noun/adjective phrase. In the second phase, the English equivalents of Identification in each phrase were obtained from three different Persian to English dictionaries to be able to extract the semantic frames for them. After extracting the frames, each English counterpart called Lexical Unit in the FrameNet alongside its semantic frame was compared to other frames and ultimately the following conclusions were drawn: the contexts where Identification is used are classified into 5 categories as linguistics, medical science, law, security checking and politics. Regarding the same usage of some words in two categories, four semantic frames are evoked out of five contexts all of which share the concept of the capability of making distinction and that of making decision.