Male and Female Naming Nexus: A Morphosemantic Analysis

Abstract

Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language and there are a few works in the language on the nexus between male and female naming patterns with reference to their morphosemantic analysis. With the affixation of a single vocabulary item, a male name is changed into a female name. Sometimes, a female name is derived from a male name with null affixation. The present research is a theoretical study that highlights and interprets morphosemantic features of female names derived from male names. The data for the analysis have been taken from the dictionaries of Urdu and Arabic, text books, grammar books, and brochures. The researcher has applied Distributed Morphology (DM) that deals with syntactic, morphological and semantic levels of a word simultaneously. It was first postulated in the early 1990s at MIT by Halle (1990), Marantz (1993, 1994), Harley and Noyer (1999). It was Marantz (1984) who first proposed the idea of replacing syntactic structure with morphological structure. The theory of DM can be applied to the local languages of Pakistan to decipher their morphosemantic richness.