Analysis of the Influence of Identifiability Parameter on Linguistic Coding A Contrastive Study

The information structure of a sentence is concerned with the formal expression of the referents and propositions in a given discourse. The formal expression of a referent is affected، among others، by such factors as the degree of mental identifiability of the referents، the pragmatic relation of referents in a proposition، etc. Based on the identifiability parameter proposed by Lambrecht (1994)، the present study is intended to analyze the different lexico-grammatical codings of the mental referents and propositions in English and Persian. To do so، the first chapter of George Orwell''s “Animal Farm” and its translation by Amir Amirshahi were analyzed based on the concepts of information structure theory. The findings revealed that the morphological coding in both English and Persian is affected by the degree of identifiability of the mental referents; in particular، identifiable referents were found to be represented by weak forms and unidentifiable referents by strong forms. In addition، English and Persian preferred morphological forms were found to be different. It was also found that identifiability parameter affects both the syntactic and prosodic patterns of the languages involved. The utterances with identifiable referents were mainly matched with subject position or were mainly coded as unaccented. In addition، it was found that، unlike morphological coding of both source language (English) and target language (Persian)، identifiability parameter affected the prosodic and syntactic forms of both languages almost in the same way. Chi-square and Z test were used to show the significance of the statistics.