مجتبی منشی زاده

The present study deals with imperative mood in Persian language based on prototype theory which is one of sub-theories of the cognitive linguistics approach. The research hypotheses are based on distinctions between the form and meaning components in the imperative mood and its distribution in the language corpus of contemporary literature. The aim of this paper is to describe and classify the criterion of the imperative mood in different language levels and beyond. According to the cognitive linguistics approach, language is part of a cognitive system and the syntactic structure of a language can't be studied separately, but all influential factors should be considered from different lingual aspects. The data analysis was carried out through descriptive and qualitative methods. It was found that the base of the verb has a high frequency in the corpus, but the form and meaning are different, with the meaning of imperative mood depending on the context. As a result, all language layers, forms and meanings in description and classification of the imperative mood should be taken into account to be analyzed cognitively.

Compounding is one of the most common and also very productive word formation processes among languages in the world. Because of its productivity and high frequency, it has precisely been studied by many Iranian and non-Iranian linguists. However, this productive process has not yet been studied in Mazandarani. In the present study, first Mazandarani compound words taken from Tabari dictionary, have been analysed in the form of a table and based on the criteria such as syntactic category, semantic classification of compound types (endocentric, exocentric and dvandva), the position of head and being verbal or nonverbal. By taking into consideration the above mentioned criteria and based on three fundamental concepts, namely, head, dependent (non-head) and feature percolation, the resulting compounds have been analysed separately. At the end of the article, after studying and evaluating the hypotheses, appropriate explanations have been presented. The high frequency of “N+ N → compound noun construction” refers to their predictability in meaning compared to other constructions. It means that there is a direct relationship between high frequency of a word formation process and its semantic predictability. Also, the reason why endocentric compounds are more frequent than others is due to the fact that both constituents of the compound are used in their original meanings. Hence, endocentric compounds are unmarked elements and are easier to learn in the process of language learning. The above mentioned findings are in line with markedness theory. That is why the frequency of occurrence of unmarked elements is higher than marked ones which is related to language universals.