Some issues in the morphological analysis of nominal plurals in Persian

Pegah Faghiri (1, 2)

1 Mondes Iranien et Indien - UMR 7528
2 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

Under the framework of Whole Word Morphology (WWM) developed by Ford and Singh (Ford et al. 1997), this paper proposes a synchronic description of nominal plural morphology in Persian (limited to Tehran’s spoken variety). Some problematic issues in the existing analyses are: 1) It is common to divide the plural morphology into Persian and Arabic. This etymological division, based on the illegitimate hypothesis that all speakers have access to words’ etymology, has no place in a synchronic analysis. 2) A proper explanation of double plurals, ranging from speech errors: maqâlâthâ, nazarâthâ..., to commonly used forms: omurât, omurhâ, rosumât, rosumhâ..., is lacking. 3) -jât has been extended both in formal and informal registers and is no longer limited to vowel-ending nouns, i.e. šarbatjât, roqanjât, boronzjât used as technical terms, as well as alkoljât, esemesjât, mozaxrafjât, sândevičjât used in a familiar register, especially by youngsters. 4) Pairs of words such as čarand/čarandiyât, qazal/qazaliyât, jafang/jafangiyât, hajv/hajviyât challenge the analyses of -iyât as a phonological variant of -ât. 5) Finally, given that a variety of plural forms is available to speakers, and the fact that these forms are not always interchangeable, the question of how the choice of plural marking is determined is raised.

Mots clés: Persian; Morphology; Nominal plurals

Domaines: Linguistique

Pegah Faghiri. Some issues in the morphological analysis of nominal plurals in Persian. International Conference on Iranian Linguistics (ICIL3), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 (Pollet Samvelian), Sep 2009, Paris, France. ⟨halshs-01480080⟩