Topicalization and Focus Movement in Persian A Feature-Based Approach

Topicalization and focus movement have been discussed in literature with respect to a vriety of their properties. In Persian, syntactic objects within Tense Phrase, including phrasal arguments, may freely be displaced to a higher position and the reordering of these elements is mainly considered to be the result of discourse functional elements such as topic and focus. The present study is an effort to address the question of the formal motiviation of these movements, and their formalization within a feature-based system.