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Syntactic and Semantic Categories of Echo Words in Persian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Don L. F. Nilsen
Don L. F. Nilsen*
Affiliation:
University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls
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Extract

The entire Persian-speaking world, including Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, has had a very long and colorful tradition in oral literature. Since memorization has long been an integral part of Persian culture, rhyming as an aid to memorization has been especially prevalent in Persian literature. Because of this, and because of the oral tradition in general, Persian speakers have long been especially conscious of rhyming patterns. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate what morphological and syntactic devices are used to form rhyming patterns (as well as alliteration and assonance patterns) in Persian, and to investigate the effect that these rhyming patterns have on Persian grammar. In addition, the paper will attempt to determine what semantic categories are especially amenable to echo-word formation.

The least significant, and probably the least deliberate of syntactic devices for echo-word formation in Persian, is the use of various suffixes and prefixes.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2-3 , Spring Summer 1972 , pp. 88 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1972

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented in the Language and Linguistics Panel of the MESA Convention in Denver, Colorado in November, 1971. The author would like to express his appreciation to Gernot Windfuhr (University of Michigan), Iraj Bashiri (University of Minnesota), Mohammad Ali Jazayery (University of Texas), and Ali Banuazizi (Boston College) for reading preliminary versions of the paper and for significantly influencing its revision. In an attempt to conserve space, only a few examples from each category were given. Anyone who is interested in obtaining additional examples should contact the author.