ماجرای پایان‌ناپذیر «فعل مرکب»: درآمدی به مفهوم‌شناسی و اصطلاح‌شناسی فعل غیربسیط در زبان فارسی

بخش وسیعی از نوشتگان موجود دربارة «فعل مرکب» در زبان فارسی به تعیین مصادیق این اصطلاح اختصاص یافته است. با این حال، پس از قریب به چهار قرن از شناسایی این ساخت در زبان فارسی، هنوز پژوهشگران بر سر تعریف یا تلقی واحدی از آن به اجماع نرسیده‌اند. در نوشتار پیش رو بر آنیم تا نشان دهیم این اختلاف نظر بیشتر ریشة اصطلاح‌شناختی دارد تا مفهوم‌شناختی. بدین منظور پس از مرور آراء عمدة نویسندگان دربارة زنجیره‌های موسوم به «فعل مرکب»، این زنجیره‌ها را بر اساس تعاریف مقبول نزد زبان‌شناسان از دو مفهوم «فعل» و «مرکب» مورد ارزیابی قرار داده و نشان می‌دهیم که اولاً «فعل» بودنِ آنها چندان وجهی ندارد و ثانیاً مشکل بتوان همة آنها را «مرکب» (به مفهوم ترکیب ساخت واژی) محسوب نمود. در پایان پیشنهاد کرده‌ایم که همة این ساخت‌ها را می‌توان تحت مقولة «محمول مرکب» (معنایی یا دستوری) گنجاند و بدین ترتیب به اتفاق نظر نزدیک شد.

The Endless Story of “Compound Verbs”: An Introduction to Conceptology and Terminology of Complex Verbs in Persian

Much of the literature about Persian ‘compound verbs’ has been concerned with their ‘true’ instances. About four centuries after identification of this construction, however, there is yet little agreement on any single definition or conception of it among scholars. The present article aimed to show that this controversy was primarily a matter of terminology rather than conceptology. To this end, after reviewing major authors’ views on socalled &compound verbs&, we examined various kinds of constructions involved according to linguists’ received definitions of the two concepts of ‘verb’ and ‘compound’. It turned out that i) there was no good reason for regarding ‘compound verbs’ as verbs and ii) being separable strings, they could hardly be considered as proper morphological “compounds”. We then suggested that all these kinds of constructions could well be subsumed under the rubric ‘complex predicates’ (whether semantic or grammatical), thus making it more likely to reach a consensus on the issue.Keywords: Compound Verb, Predicate, Incorporation, Compounding, Light Verb, Persian IntroductionThe commonalities of metaanalytical literature on “compound verbs” in Persian can be summarized as follows:Taking for granted the existence of ‘compound verbs’Examining and evaluating the current definitions of ‘compound verbs’ according to their own conceptionsEndorsing one or more previous opinions (with some minor modifications) without dealing with the nature of disagreement among scholars in recognizing the instances of ‘compound verbs’. Material and MethodsThe variety of strings referred to as “compound verbs” covers a vast range. Having reviewed and compared representative opinions of authors and their definitions of these strings, we can sum up their viewpoints as follows:Incorporational verbs (like γazāxordan ‘to eat food’, lit. ‘food eat’) and verbal phrases (like azdastdādan ‘to lose’, lit. ‘from hand give’) were regarded as ‘compound verbs’ only by DabirMoghaddam, and experiencersubject LVCs[1] (like dardam gereft ‘it pained me’, lit. ‘to me pain took’) only by Khanlari.DabirMoghaddam and Abolghassemi considered (some of) the auxiliary verb constructions (present perfect, past perfect, and passive) to be ‘compound verbs’.Khayyampour and DabirMoghaddam regarded prefixed verbs (like bardāštan ‘pick up’) as ‘compound verbs’.Vahidian did not believe in ‘compound verbs’ to exist in Persian at all. Discussion of Results and ConclusionsLooking at the abovementioned definitions by the authors, it was noted that their conceptions of ‘compound’ simply meant an expression that was not simple, i.e., not having more than one element, which is usually called ‘complex’ (as opposed to ‘simplex’) in English. A ‘complex verb’ is a verb with more than one element. The additional elements could be the result of various kinds of affixation (including personal endings or other inflectional or derivational affixes) or compounding. A proper ‘compound verb’, however, is a verb that is formed specifically through the morphological process of compounding, in which two lexical items (typically verbal roots) join together to form a lexeme.Therefore, if by ‘compound’ we mean ‘complex’, i.e. by ‘compound’ consisting of two or more elements, then, a ‘compound verb’ would be certainly complex. Terminologically speaking, however, morphological criteria like inextensibility could not be excluded from compounds, including alleged ‘compound verbs’, which do not meet such criteria. For example, although kār(hā) kard ‘(s)he did thing(s)’, lit. ‘work(s) did’ despite its extensibility, is undoubtedly complex, to regard it as a morphological compound requires us to revise the concept of ‘compound’.As for ‘verbness’ of a ‘compound verb’, given the linguists’ received definition of a verb, according to which ‘verb’ is the locus of indicating tense and often aspect, mood, and agreement, ‘verbness’ of socalled ‘compound verb’ was highly arguable because most of them were split by inflectional affixes intervening their two components. Thus, before referring to any of these strings as a ‘verb’, we needed to make clear in which sense their preverbal elements were parts of the verb.It seemed that what the authors, such as Khanlari and DabirMoghaddam, meant by ‘verb’ in a ‘compound verb’ was a ‘predicate’ rather than a verb as such. This terminological confusion was rooted in the term ‘predicate’ having at least the following two senses:In semantics and formal logic, it is an element of a proposition, which express some property of, or relation between, argument(s). This kind of predicate can be called ‘semantic predicate’.In traditional grammar, it is a part of a proposition, which does not include the ‘subject’. This type of predicate we can refer to as ‘grammatical predicate’.