There is scarce systematic research on the role of genres and their associated discourse features in Information Structure and its syntactic representations in Persian. The current descriptive, corpus-based study, therefore, aimed to investigate three different genres of Persian spoken language; that is, political, scientific and daily conversation, in terms of their Information Structure as realized through four syntactic devices of clefting, pseudo-clefting, passive and preposing. To this purpose, 1000 different utterances related to each of the mentioned genres, were extracted from the multi-media archive of IRNA (Iranian News Agency) website and daily conversations of the researchers’ family members and friends, based on Lambrecht’s theoretical framework in modeling the Information Structure. The collected data were then transcribed, the syntactic devices were identified, and descriptive statistics were used to see how the above syntactic devices are represented in each genre type. The results revealed that the devices are represented differently in the three genres of political, scientific, and daily conversations. This finding may be of interest to linguists and language theoreticians. تفاصيل المقالة

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. تفاصيل المقالة