Optimality in Text: Presupposition Triggers

Grammar is a bidirectional system that links forms and meanings together so it is speaker-oriented as well as listener -oriented. The text, as the product of this system, is also bidirectional. In this paper, using the data of two screenplays by Asghar Farhadi, in the framework of Blutner's bidirectional optimization (1998, 2000) and its reinforcement by Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (1995), we studied Persian discourse markers. We used the amount of cognitive effects and the time to reach them as constraints in optimality and presented a new definition of the discourse markers. It was found that discourse markers lead to the production of optimal relevance by producing context through presupposition, guiding the audience to achieve cognitive effects and reducing the processing time of cognitive effects. We concluded that optimality in text is the result of applying the optimization process to the text production and interpretation simultaneously and bidirectionaly.