Postposing and Information Structure in English and Farsi/Persian

• Authors: Soheila Shafiei
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The term postposing denotes any construction in which a phrasal constituent appears to the right of its canonical position, leaving its initial position either empty or occupied by an expletive. Ward and Birner (2004) argue that postposed constructions preserve the old-before-new information structure paradigm in English. The present paper investigates postposed constituents in Persian to find out the information structure paradigm of such constructions. The data have been taken from 34 interviews. The findings show that various constituents might undergo postposing in spoken Farsi (known as Tehrani dialect), and, in contrast to English, NPs were found to be triggered in postposed position when the referent was hearer-old.

Keywords

EN

discourse-new; discourse-old; hearer-new; hearer-old; information structure; preposing; postposing

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Romanian Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 48-55

Dates

published

2014-03-01

online

2014-05-01

Contributors

author

Soheila Shafiei

• Norwegian University of Science and Technology

References

• Birner, Betty J. and Mahootian, Shahrzad. 1996. “Functional constraints on inversion in English and Farsi.” Language Sciences 18(1-2):127-138.[Crossref]
• Birner, Betty J. and Ward, Gregory. 1998. Information status and noncanonical word order in English (Studies in Language Companion Series 40). Amsterdam /Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publication.
• Karimi, Simin. 1994. “Word-order variations in contemporary spoken Persian” in Persian Studies in North America: Studies in Honor of Mohammad Ali Jazayery. Mehdi Marashi (Ed.). Maryland: IRANBOOKS, pp. 43-73.
• Karimi, Simin and Taleghani, Azita. 2007. “Wh-movement, interpretation, and optionality in Persian” in Phrasal and clausal architecture: Syntactic derivation and interpretation. Simin Karimi, Vida Samiian, and Wendy. K. Wilkins (Eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 167-187.
• Mahootian, Shahrzad. 1997. Persian. London: Routledge.
• Mahootian, Shahrzad. 2008. “Inversion and Topicalization in Farsi Discourse” in Aspects in Iranian Linguistics. Simin Karimi, Vida Sammiian, and Donald Stilo (Eds.). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publication, pp. 277-288.
• Ward, Gregory and Birner, Betty J. 2004. “Information Structure and Non-canonical Syntax.” in The Handbook of Pragmatics. Horn Laurence and Gregory Ward (Eds.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 152-174.
• Ward, Gregory. 1999. “A comparison of postposed subjects in English and Italian” in Pragmatics & beyond. New series. Akio Kamio and Ken-ichi Takami (Eds.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 3-21.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/rjes-2014-0006