Relative Importance in English and Persian: Thematization Or Tonic Prominence?

There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spokenlanguage: tonic prominence and thematization. the former is expressing themain points of information units in speech (halliday, 1994), and the latter isputting an element at the beginning of a clause. this study explores howrelative importance is realized in english and persian. it also investigateshow advanced persian learners of english assign it in english. 20 persiandeclaratives were given to 30 persian native speakers (pnss) to assignrelative importance in whatever way. results revealed that pnss morethematize rather than use tonic prominence. then, the english equivalents ofthe 20 persian declaratives were given to 10 english native speakers (enss).results demonstrated that enss thematize more too. finally, the sameenglish clauses were given to 20 learners of english. contrary toexpectations, results showed their greater use of tonic prominence.