Discoursal and Syntactic Differences of It-Cleft and Pseudo Cleft Sentences in Persian

It-cleft and pseudo cleft sentences go under cleft structures. In the related literature، their discoursal differences in terms of weight، chain of reference، discourse function and their syntactic differences with regard to the constituent which can possibly appear in the position of the clefted constituent have been shown based on the data from English، and it has been proven that they are not interchangeable. This article – based on Persian data which are gathered from literary، scientific، historical texts and newspapers – tries to see if the same differences are observed in Persian، and if there exists any difference between English and Persian. The data include 105 it-cleft and 67 pseudo cleft sentences