Investigating the Information Structure and Syntactic Structure of Post-posed Constituents in Persian Simple Marked Sentences(A Corpus- based Approach)

Information structure deals with how old (evoked) and new information is distributed in the sentences of a text. The present study is aimed at investigating the information structure of post-posed constituents of Persian simple sentences. Grammatical role and syntactic category of the post-posed constituents were, also, investigated. To achieve the goals, a corpus including 226 simple sentences was investigated to analyze the information status of post-posed constituents. Ward and Birner (2004) and Birner (2013) were referred to frequently as theoretical model. The findings revealed that most of the post-posed constituents were old (evoked or inferential) in terms of discourse, while new in listeners' view. As far as grammatical role is concerned, subjects (apposed to previous literature) were found to be post-posed more than other grammatical roles. Finally, in terms of syntactic categories, the pos-posed constituents were found to be mainly prepositional phrases and noun phrases