چکیده:
This research examines the grammatical tools that represent information structure in Persian writing across three different contexts: scientific articles, short stories, and newspaper news texts. The term 'grammatical tools' in this research refers to passive, attributive, and quasi-attributive syntactic structures. To collect the data for this study, for the story context, 10 short stories selected from the Holy Defense literary awards were used; for the scientific context, ten linguistic articles in the field of discourse analysis were used; and for the news text context, with the same corpus volume, three different newspapers—Hamshahri, Aftab Yazd, and Ettela'at—were used. The data extracted from these texts were analyzed one by one within the framework of Lambrecht's information structure theory, and the type of focus and pragmatic topic was determined in them. Then, the frequency of occurrence of each syntactic structure in each context was measured, and subsequently, the observed difference in the frequency of these structures in different contexts was discussed and examined. This research shows that the frequency of the passive structure compared to other structures in the context of scientific texts has a significant difference. The investigations conducted in this research indicate that the high frequency of this structure in scientific articles is related, on one hand, to the primary function of this structure, which is to omit or downplay the role of the agent in the sentence, and on the other hand, to the principle of maintaining neutrality and objectivity in scientific writings. In other words, in event-based scientific writings, the passive structure is used more frequently, whereas in narrative texts, which are agent-based and where the agent and characters of a narrative play a prominent role, the passive structure is used much less. Furthermore, it was found that another characteristic of scientific articles that leads to the increased use of the passive structure in this type of context is the volume and information load that the texts and sentences of this type of writing possess. In other words, compared to the short story context, the information load of sentences in scientific articles is much higher. This heavy information load leads to the production of long, complex, and compound sentences in these articles; given this characteristic, the author of these types of articles is forced to use passive sentences to create cohesion and coherence between sentences in the text, because one of the functions of such a structure is to promote the object of an active sentence to the status of given information in the passive sentence. Therefore, this passive function allows the author to maintain thematic connections between sentences and smooth the flow of information in scientific articles. Other findings of this research include the very low use of attributive and quasi-attributive structures in all three contexts in the Persian language. In this regard, the data analysis showed that the primary function of these two structures is to create contrastive emphasis on one of the constituents of the sentence. However, in the Persian language, this functional role is usually performed by the syntactic structure of fronting, because Persian has flexible word order, a feature that provides the possibility of promoting a constituent to the initial position of the sentence for contrastive emphasis. Consequently, the low frequency of attributive and quasi-attributive structures in Persian writing is related to the high frequency of the fronting structure in this language.
خلاصه ماشینی:
With reference to these classifications, in the present article, three contexts—scientific articles, short stories, and newspaper news texts—have been selected as the data corpus to investigate the existing difference in the frequency of occurrence of syntactic tools that represent information structure.
In the data analysis, we will first analyze each of these structures in the context of scientific articles, short story texts, and newspaper news texts within the framework of Lembrecht's information structure theory; in other words, by analyzing the data, we are looking for the role each of these syntactic structures plays in representing what kind of focus (sentential, topical, or propositional).
" Pragmatic topic: He (the fox of the story) Focus: "had been hunted" Type of focus: Propositional Analysis: In the above example, the third-person pronoun "he," which refers to the referent of the fox, has been promoted to the position of the subject of the passive sentence with the semantic role of patient.
In the following, three instances of these structures are examined in three contexts: scientific articles, short stories, and newspaper texts; then, in the statistical analysis section of the research, the difference in the frequency of these structures in the three specified contexts and the explanation and reasoning for it will be addressed.
6. Conclusion In this research, we examined the informational structure and the frequency of occurrence of passive, predicative, and quasi-predicative structures in three different contexts, namely scientific articles, short stories, and newspaper texts.
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