A Study of Persian Discourse Structure

This work presents a first study of Persian discourse structure(s). It also integrates syn­tac­tic analysis with discourse analysis. In order to achieve this, Role and Refer­ence Grammar (RRG) (see Van Valin (1993, 2004) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997)) is used as the preferred model of syntax, since amongst current formal and functional syntactic theories only this approach has components which link directly to dis­course structures. Since there is no general theory of discourse structure avail­able, the main linguistic features that contribute to the formation of a coherent text are studied and analyzed with respect to Persian narrative discourse. An analytical method­ology to discourse analysis, as set out in Dooley and Levinsohn (2001), is follow­ed for this purpose. Chapter 2 introduces the basic axioms and principles of RRG and chapter 3 presents the approach to text analysis that is followed. In chapters 4-7 this approach is applied to Persian narrative text and covers coherence and cohesion, thematic groupings, the activation status of refer­ents in a discourse, the discourse-pragmatic structuring of sentences, fore­ground and background inform­ation, semantic relations between pro­posi­tions, the status of conversations in a narrative discourse, and the coding of participant reference. Appendix 1 contains details of the Persian text-corpus used, appendix 2 contains interlinearized versions of two of the main texts used in the study plus one additional text, and appendix 3 contains the participant reference analysis charts for these two texts.