a corpus-study on the representation of information structure in academic writing of iranian writers

Information structure (is) is a linguistic module which governs packaging of information. the issue of distribution of information in sentences is one of the most important questions for linguists studying the interaction of form and function in language. word order helps to convey speaker’s intention and thus, it is significant when authors decide to utilize structures containing either old/new or new/old formats in their writings. it is argued that postposed construction preserves the old-before-new is paradigm by presenting relatively unfamiliar information in post verbal positions. since this field is cross-linguistically sensitive, we have investigated the is patterns employed by the iranian academic authors in a corpus of 200 abstracts from iranian academic tefl journals indexed in scopus data base. the findings suggested that to help iranian academic writers to improve their writing, there is a need to develop a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic arrangements and is.