چكيده لاتين
Construction Grammar’s primary motivation was the insight that the juxtaposition of words rarely results in a simple concatenation of the meanings those words might have in isolation. The linguistic units taken to be studied in this approach are called constructions which are seen as form- meaning pairings. In construction Grammar, knowing a language equals knowing its constructions. Early studies in construction Grammar focused on peripheral and idiomatic structures. Goldberg (1995) made the most contribution to extend the constructionist framework from irregular idiomatic constructions to regular ones and hence, gave rise to Goldberg Construction Grammar which embodies a cognitive approach to the notion of construction. The present thesis aims to study the Persian construction of ‘če beresæd be’ within the framework of Goldberg Construction Grammar. To this end, 350 sentences including ‘če beresæd be’ were collected from Hamshahri Corpus (2009), google search and everyday speech of Persian speakers. To describe ‘če beresæd be’ construction, a full account of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics was provided and their constructional schemas and subschemas were identified. The analysis of 350 constructs showed that, First and foremost, ‘če beresæd be’, which acts as a coordinative conjunction, is a negative polarity element which occurs in a negative environment and needs to be licensed by a negative trigger. Regarding the trigger, ‘če beresæd be’ construction was divided into two main types, i.e. explicit negative and implicit negative. 65.5% of the sentences indicated the explicit type which is the prototypical variety and 37.4% implicitly conveyed negativity. In such sentences, the negative implicature operated as the trigger to license ‘če beresæd be’. Four subtypes of the implicit negative type were also recognized including lexical implicit negative, contextual implicit negative, implicit negative with the adverbs (hardly, barely, scarcely) and rhetorical negative, each with 65.5%, 27.4%, 0.04% and 0.02% respectively. Findings revealed that scalarity is inherent in ‘če beresæd be’ construction and the elements on the scale have an entailment relation. On the basis of analysis, two types of scale, i.e. semantic and pragmatic each with 74.2% and 25.7%, were conceived. This construction also intracts with the principles of cooperative conversation. Sentences containing ‘če beresæd be’ are used to avoid a clash between the maxims of Quantity and Relevance. While in most data, the second part of the construction directly allowed the speaker to be relevant to the topic under discussion, only 0.02% of sentences obeyed the relevance maxim through shared knowledge or contextual information.
