The Comparative Study of Markedness in Persian and English Based on SFG

The purpose of the present article is to make a comparative study of theme markedness in Persian and English medical texts. It aims to determine the similarities and differences of Persian and English with regard to markedness. The study has been done based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and is concerned with the textual metafunction of this approach. To accomplish the purpose of the study, several books and articles were selected in the field of medical sciences. The corpus contained 1000 randomly chosen clauses of written texts, the data were gathered in both Persian and English and the research method was descriptive-analytic. The restults indicated that in Persian medical texts, circumstantial adjuncts in the subject position have a high frequency, representing that such an occurrence sounds unmarked to Persian native speakers and Persian has a different word order rather than English in medical texts. It does not completely conform to the concept of Halliday’s theory with regard to markedness. This research also illustrates that the properties of being pro-drop and having non-fixed word order distinguish Persian from English regarding the notion of markedness. In addition to language differences, theme markedness is closely related to some factors such as authors’/writers’ style differences, writing form types, text-clause relationship, emphasis, contrast, and specific genre. Since, the above mentioned factors in Persian and English effect theme markedness, they are regarded as their similarities, while language structure refers to their differences.