Word Order and Information Structure in the Fifth Century AH Prose Texts

Persian texts of the earlier period, can be selected as a good case study in the field of linguistics. It is possible to look at the texts of this period through the window of functionalist frameworks and to describe its linguistic features in such a way as to become a stylistic research tool for further ado. Investigating the order of the elements in a sentence and information structure, and then communicating these two categories together allows the linguist to better understand the meaning (function) relationship with the linguistic form, and can also be a tool for identifying the stylistic features of each period. The present study attempts to consider information structure in the fifth century within the framework of Holliday’s systematic functional grammar, and also to statistically describe the order of the elements in a sentence and the syntactic structure throughout this period. The body of work contains 1,200 sentences from works such as Kashf-ul-Mahjub, Bayhaqi's History, the Qeshiriiyya treatise, al-Tafhim, the Qâboosnameh and the Ala'i encyclopedia, and then after, the patterns of ordering the main structures were identified in these texts. It was also determined whether the following sentences matched each of the patterns of information structure. This research showed that in the fifth century, the basic or unmarked form of the main elements of action statements, regarding their order, obeys the SOV pattern, and in the whole body of sentences, it corresponds to the head-final structures. The number of marked sentences was only ten percent of the whole body, which can be inferred as the flexibility of the texts in this period, in terms of the word order of the sentence. Investigating the state of information structure in this period also demonstrated that only 5% of sentences were under the marked patterns of information structure.