The Relationship between the Information Structure and the Subject- Position Noun Phrases in Standard Persian

The present study has investigated the relationship between syntactic issues and discourse issues. In order to conduct the study about 1000 sentences, from ten formal Persian written texts have been chosen. Then, the subject-position noun phrases have been analyzed and studied in terms of "assumed familiarity ". The content analysis of the sentences indicates that the "textually / situationally-evoked" noun phrases that are known to the hearer include 88.5% of the subject-position noun phrases. Moreover, the study shows that 11.5% of the subject – position noun phrases carry the unknown noun phrase markers, that is, unknown to the hearer. Therefore, it can be concluded that the subject- position noun phrases of standard Persian written texts are of high "assumed familiarity" to the hearer and often carry the old information.