To survey and describe the meaning of the word “hattā” in Farsi from the viewpoint of cognitive semantics

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

The aim of writing this article is to probe the meaning of the word “hattā” in Farsi by the use of existing cognitive facilities presented in cognitive linguistics. To do this, first, current Farsi dictionaries were studied in order for the semantic deficits to be crystal clear in providing the meaning for the word “hattā”. Then it was examined in the structuralist and generative semantics and the weakness of both in providing the meaning for the word “hattā” lead to using a cognitive analysis on the word “hattā”. Cognitively studying more than one hundred daily contexts containing the word “hattā” in Farsi resulted in emerging two contradictory meaning out of it; namely the adverbs “in addition to” and “only”, having the notions of “grouping” and “partitioning” respectively. Tested by seventy educated subjects who were more than eighteen, the semantic hypothesis was confirmed

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