old information

Discoursal and textual analysis is a field of study in linguistics which deals with various topics, including the context of information distribution (information structure) (Shehbazi, 1378). Subject Noun phrases may contain old or new information that the textual (context) and situational context and the listener play significant roles in these analyses.

Prince (1981) makes a seven-fold division that forms the theoretical framework or perspective of the current research. In this study, the relationship among some syntactic features and some discoursal features of syntax in connection with discourse topics has been studied and analyzed. Out of the total Khayyam’s 178 quatrains of the examined version, 141 quatrains, i.e. 21.79% of Khayyam"s quatrains, constitute the research data. All the sentences of the studied quatrains have been identified and the subject noun phrases of the sentences have been studied and analyzed based on the level of familiarity for the listener based on the classification of Prince (1981).

The studied quatrains included 776 sentences; so that in 748 sentences, noun phrases were found in the subject position of the sentences. Also, in 28 sentences, the subjects of the sentences were non-nominal phrases such as prepositional phrases, independent clauses or dependent clauses. Finally, 340 subject noun phrases, 45.45% of the total subject noun phrases of the sentences are devoted to the noun phrases referenced or mentioned in the text, which have shown the most frequency or usage in this study.

The results of the analysis indicate that 83.69% of the subject noun phases (SNP) in the sentences convey listener- oriented old information and 16.31% of SNP convey new information. Therefore, in general, it can be concluded that the SNP of the analyzed sentences have a high level of familiarity for the listener, that is, they often convey old information.

Information, structure as well as phonetic, syntactic and semantic construction, has been one of the subjects of attention among linguists in recent years. Since information structure or , in other words, the way of distributing syntactic structures in dramatic texts is of great importance, the textual totality of the play ofool by Akbar Radi is used as linguistic data and as evidence in the analysis of the construction of information in sentences. To the knowledge of the authors of this research, no research has been conducted on the arrangement of sentence information in the dramatic genre; To this end, Akbar Radi's play entitled ofool was chosen as the corpus of research. The research method is descriptive-analytical. In order to analyze the informative structure of sentences, some phonetic, lexical and syntactic rules have been analyzed and summarized in this research. The findings revealed that this play is not the case of exception and encompasses all the advantages of this linguistic devices. In their own turn , these devices can be served to demonstrate staging, characterization and other dramatic thems. This linguistic devices are also used to serve the aesthetic aspects of the dramatic genre and create textual cohesion.

Abstract“ke” as a multi functional morpheme used in spoken and written Persian language performs several different usages such as indefinite pronoun,complementizer,focus marker…as well as a relativizer which introduces Relative Clauses without undergoing any change but accepting various roles.This study aims to look into the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic roles of “ke” in Persian relative clauses.To give a somehow sufficient description of “ke”,a careful study of a natural corpus in which this phenomenon is used is necessary.Therefore,for an efficient research,data has been collected from the natural occuring sentences of spoken and written Persian.Thereafter,”ke” is studied syntactically, semantically and pragmatically in Relative Clauses. This article which is descriptive-analytic is done within the typological framework based on the work of Comrie(1989) to answer the question of “which syntactic,semantic and pragmatic roles does “ke” have in Persian relative clauses?The main hypothesis considers all grammatical functions for “ke”.According to the findings of this research “ke” manifests all the same grammatical roles such as subject,object…as a noun phrase does.It plays many different semantic roles like agent,patient,goal….Moreover,“ke” can follow any structure to focus as a focus marker with both old and new information.Key words: relative clause, relativizer, semantic roles, new information, old information.

Other things being equal, grammatical subject is coded as the theme of the clause. In marked cases, however, other non-subject arguments and prepositional phrases may appear as the theme due to some processes, including pre-posing. Accordingly, the goals of the present study are three-fold. First, it aims at investigating the information status of grammatical subject as the unmarked theme of the clause. Secondly, it intends to find the marked themes in the non-canonical constructions, including inversion, topicalization, passivization, and scrambling. Preposing as a cover terms includes all these processes. Accordingly, this study is set out to examine information status, syntactic category, and grammatical function of preposed constituents (marked themes). The degree of matching between grammatical subject and theme is also investigated. This study is a corpus-based one in which the data are collected from two different corpora: a movie (Separation by Farhadi) and a football report. The theory of information structure by Prince (1992) revised in Birner (2013) is adopted as theoretical model of the study. Based on this theory, information is classified in terms of discourse and hearer. Accordingly, information status of any constituent can be one of these for cases: discourse old- hearer old, discourse old- hearer new, discourse new- hearer old, and discourse new- hearer new. This classification is applied to the collected themes (both marked and unmarked) of both corpora. Halliday (2004) is another theoretical basis of this study. Different types of themes are taken from Halliday(2004) to be analyzed in terms of information status. The focus in this study is on topical themes (not interpersonal or textual themes). The target themes were, then, coded based on the theoretical model and they were analyzed by SPSS (version 23). In terms of syntactic markedness, the results indicated that in football report, there were more numbers of marked syntactic structures comparing with the film corpus. As for the match between subject and theme, the results indicated a higher amount of match between these two concepts in film corpus comparing with football report corpus. The lower match between subject and theme in football report can be accounted for by the higher number of movements and dislocations in the syntactic category of this type of language.  As stated, the main goal of this study was to investigate the information status of both marked and unmarked themes. As for unmarked theme (subject), the results showed that in film corpus such themes are mainly old (more than 90%) both in terms of discourse and hearer. In contrast, the themes were found to be mainly discourse-old but hearer new (more than 65%) in the football report corpus.  This is due to the different nature of these two corpora. In daily conversations (film), we have topic continuity, while in football the sentences are expressed to refer to different individuals (no topic continuity). As stated, preposed (marked themes) are also investigated. As for information status, there is almost the same pattern as unmarked themes. Most of the marked themes in film corpus are old both in terms of discourse and hearer. In football report corpus, however, the marked themes (preposed themes) are mainly discourse- old and hearer new. This is somehow problematic, since the discourse old entities cannot be hearer-new. Prince (1992) resolved this problem by raising the issue of schemata and set relations. She believed that many referents are implied in the discourse and hence counted as being discourse-old.  She called them inferable. In football report corpus, there were many such inferable marked themes. Another unexpected finding was the high amount of new preposed themes in film corpus which seems to contradict the previous literature (Birner, (1996), for example). Careful examination of literature does not ban the occurrence of new pre-posed items in theme position, although themes naturally have identifiable referents. ‘recency of new-ness/ old-ness proposed by Birner (1996) can account for the emerged pattern in the present study. The results of this study are important both theoretically and practically. Many findings showed that the constraints on preposing are not observed in the two investigated corpora. It implies that Persian language, due to its flexible word order, does not follow the rules of other languages. It seems there is a connection between language type and the kind of the constraints in that language. This can be a suggestion for further study to find the appropriate constraints governing information status of themes in Persian. Another implication of this study is the fact that in the same language, we do not have the same patterns as far as the information status of themes is concerned. As it was found, the information status of themes in film corpus was dramatically different from football report corpus. Therefore, one cannot generalize the results obtained in a study to the whole language.

Information structure plays a role in all layers of grammar in which meaning exists and studies sentences which are semantically similar, but formally different; such as the ones with the non-canonical word order which are considered as marked sentences. The unmarked order of information which the constituents convey is old-new. However, in the structures with a marked word order, the information status is likely to be marked. In other words, the order of topic-comment may not always be identical with old-new order of information. In this article the information status of specific forms and word orders is going to be analyzed based on the data from literary, scientific, story, and newspaper texts.

This research will try out to investigate into information structure and discusse items such as new and old information and Finally introduce Prince΄s categorization of information.