A Study of Discourse Anaphora in Persian Language based on Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski’s Givenness Hierarchy

Abstract

One of the main themes of discourse analysis is information structure. The impact on the syntactic, phonological and morphological form of the sentence of information structure is observable. Regarding its impact on the morphological form, there exists an area of research called ‘discourse anaphora’. The present study analyzed discourse anaphora in the novel ‘School’s Principal’ and the book ‘Language and Thought’ based on Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski's (1993) Givenness Hierarchy. The model consists of six cognitive statuses. It is believed that the choice of the form of referring expressions depends on the cognitive status of the referent in the mind of hearer (reader). In the present study, twelve referring forms were chosen, and different cognitive statuses were identified and presented in a separate table for each form based on the collected examples. Finally, based on the numbers and statistics taken from the tables, the degree of compatibility of the predictions of the Givenness Hierarchy with Persian data was observed.

Keywords

• information structure
• discourse anaphora
• givenness hierarchy
• cognitive statuses
• persian referring forms