Document Type : Research original ,Regular Article

Authors

• Leila Gholipour Hsasnkiadeh ¹
• Foroogh Kazemi ²

¹ PhD Student of Linguistics, Department Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

² Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran. (Corresponding Author),

Abstract

The morphological systems tend to follow certain principles, transparency is one of these important principles. This study examined the transparency of Persian and English inflectionals based on natural morphology. The main issue is how transparency is represented according to natural morphology. Persian data are selected from Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies Corpora and English data are extracted from Corpus of Contemporary American English through random sampling (and based on equal number of words). Afterwards, they were analyzed based on Dressler and Mayerthaler’s approach. The results indicate, in Persian, the plural markers –ha,-un, the superlative adjective marker -tarin, past tense suffixes –t, -ad, and negation prefix n-, and in English, the genitive marker -'s, superlative adjective marker -est and past participle -en are transparent and the rest is opaque. Findings indicate the transparency of nouns and verbs in Persian is more than adjectives; however, in English, it′s not true. This is one of the differences of two morphological systems. Also, there is no direct relationship between transparency and frequency of inflectional affixes. Indeed, there is a direct relationship between grammatical categories and transparency of inflectional affixes. This relationship doesn’t necessarily apply to the transparency of each affix with its frequency.

Keywords

• Frequency
• Inflectional Affixes
• Inflectional Values
• Natural Morphology Theory
• Persian and English
• Transparency

Main Subjects

• General linguistics