خلاصة:
There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learners of English assign it in English. 20 Persian declaratives were given to 30 Persian Native Speakers (PNSs) to assign relative importance in whatever way. Results revealed that PNSs more thematize rather than use tonic prominence. Then, the English equivalents of the 20 Persian declaratives were given to 10 English Native Speakers (ENSs). Results demonstrated that ENSs thematize more too. Finally, the same English clauses were given to 20 learners of English. Contrary to expectations, results showed their greater use of tonic prominence.
ملخص الجهاز:
ir Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Khouzestan Abstract There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization.
This study aims at revealing how English and Persian native speakers assign relative importance to a given element in a spoken clause.
Another approach to the study of thematic structures is equating tonicity to the status of information within which the tonic element spotlights the new information and what remains is given information which receives no emphasis (Bolinger, 1972; Chafe, 1974; Gussenhoven, 1984; Halliday, 1967a, 1970, 1994; Heldner and Strangert, 2001; Ladd, 1980, 1996; Nooteboomand and Kruyt, 1987).
Moreover, the present study makes endeavors to determine whether, in speech, advanced Persian learners of English are able to assign relative importance to given elements in clauses as ENSs do.
Therefore, the results revealed that Persian native speakers tend to more or less thematize some elements in clauses to assign relative importance in speech.
By virtue of the fact that these language learners are not made aware of thematization in English speech, they would rather make use of tonic prominence to spotlight relative importance in clauses.
This way, one can extend Hoey's theory to lexicogrammatical structures of language and claim that native speakers of both English and Persian, through picking up their languages as children growing up, have primarily primed the thematization of specific elements in clauses with assigning relative importance instead of applying tonic prominence to those elements.