Syntactic Devices of Information Structure in Persian Spoken Genres: Political, Scientific, and Everyday Conversation in Focus

This descriptive and corpus-based study examined the role of genres and their discourse features in information structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. It aimed to investigate three genres of Persian spoken language, that is, political, scientific, and everyday conversation, in terms of their information structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive, and preposing. For this purpose, 1000 utterances related to each of the mentioned genres were extracted based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework for modeling the information structure. The collected data were then transcribed, and the most frequently-used syntactic structures of information structure in each genre were identified. Finally, the Mann-Whitney U test and descriptive statistics were used to see which of the three genre types has higher values than the other two in terms of the four syntactic devices. The results of data analysis revealed that there is a significant difference among the three genres in terms of the frequency of use of syntactic devices. In fact, preposing occurred most frequently in everyday conversations, passives in scientific texts, and clefting and pseudo-clefts in political texts. This finding has supportive implications for linguistic and educational experts as well as language theoreticians.