Investigating the Phonological, and Morphological Representations of the Concept of TOPIC-hood in Narrative Texts

Topic as one the basic notion of information structure is represented by rather different linguistic tools in different languages. In present approach, topic is defined based on the pragmatic relation which it plays in a proposition. In the present study, two goals are to be followed as far as topic is concerned: first, the linguistic representation of topic is to be investigated in English and Persian. Second, the relationship between topic-hood with definiteness and prosodic prominence is also investigated. To fulfill these goals, a corpus of data including more than 1000 noun phrases and 500 sentences were analyzed contrastively in English and Persian. The results revealed that English and Persian have their own different preferred topic expressions (first goal). As for the second goal, the employed X² showed there is a meaningful relation between topic-hood with the three investigated variables. Furthermore, Z-test showed that this factor (topic-hood) has almost the same effect in both contrasted languages as far as prosody (stress) is concerned. However, this effect has been reported to result in the use of rather different morphological forms (definiteness) in the two languages.