Investigating the Information Structure and Syntactic Structure of Pre-posed Constituents in Persian Simple Sentences (Based on a Football Report)

Language form is affected by many factors. This study is intended to investigate the information distribution in the simple Persian marked and unmarked structures. Information structure deals with how old (evoked) and new information are distributed in the sentences of a text. The present study is aimed at investigating the information structure of Pre-posed constituents of Persian simple sentences. Grammatical role and syntactic category of the pre-posed constituents were, also, investigated. To achieve the goals, a corpus including 226 simple sentences from a football match between Real Madrid and Juventus was investigated to analyze the information status of pre-posed constituents. The collected sentences were all simple (marked and unmarked) sentences. Prince (1992), Ward and Birner (2004) and Birner (2013) were referred to frequently as theoretical model of this study. After collecting the data, they were codified and analyzed employing SPSS software version 23. Findings revealed that most of the pre-posed constituents were old (evoked or inferential) in terms of discourse, while new in listeners' view. As far as grammatical role is concerned, indirect objects were found to be pre-posed more than other grammatical roles. Finally, in terms of syntactic categories, the pre-posed constituents were found to be mainly noun phrases and prepositional phrases.