A recent study by Dr. Adel Rafiei and Dr. Hadaegh Rezaei, Assistant Professors of Linguistics at the University of Isfahan, offers a comprehensive analysis of the Persian suffix –gar, shedding new light on its semantic diversity and historical development.

The research investigates how –gar, a productive agentive suffix in Persian, forms a wide range of deverbal and denominal nouns and adjectives. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010), the authors examine the polysemy of –gar-derived forms and categorize them into three main groups: general human agents, occupational human agents, and non-human agents (instruments).

The study is based on a robust dataset of 124 lexical items extracted from major linguistic resources, including Sokhan Dictionary, Zansou Reverse Dictionary, and the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB). In addition, a diachronic analysis was conducted using the Farhanyar corpus, which spans Persian texts from the 9th century to the present.

Findings suggest that the prototypical meaning of the [x–gar] construction is “a human agent performing a regular and distinguished action related to the base.” The research further demonstrates that the emergence of instrumental meanings represents a relatively recent development, likely influenced by English loanwords ending in –er. This shift is explained as a case of pattern-level semantic extension rather than word-level borrowing.

The authors also argue for the existence of independent sub-schemas governing occupational and non-occupational agent nouns, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of word formation processes in Persian.

This study highlights the dynamic nature of morphological constructions and offers valuable insights into the interaction between language contact, semantic change, and lexical productivity.