An analysis of the word “didan” (See) based on frame semantics

Abstract

This paper set up to investigate the word “didan” (see) based on frame semantics to explore how the sense of words can be traced back through human’s experiences and background knowledge. In other words, the purpose of this paper is to clarify such delicate meaning distinctions, which are mainly overlooked in dictionaries. To solve this problem, we started this study by searching different texts and corpus so that we could find semantic frames for “didan” from one hand, and extract differences between the verb “didan” and other partially synonymous verbs such as “moshahede kardan” (observe), “tamasha kardan” (watch), etc, on the other hand. Then, we try to determine how polysemous verb of “didan” is analyzed in terms of semantic frames. By analyzing data, we have found out that the relationship between different frames with that of “base sensory-eye” frame is the cause of polysemy. Furthermore, the partially synonymous verbs are differentiated from the verb “didan” based on ‘aim, target, etc. variables’; last but not least we have put forward a model that shows how “didan” and its different frames are related and how partially synonymous words are differentiated from it. © 2016, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.