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 learne...

This study presents a view of diachronic change in language, according to which one of the fundamental factors motivating syntactic change is to be found in the conflicting interaction of principles determining the language organization. Specifically, it will be argued that principles of structural nature and principles of perceptual nature are in conflict in languages of the SOV type, because ...

0 Introduction This paper represents the continutation of research into the identiication of the relationship between the head of a relative clause and the clause body, for Japanese. Unlike many languages, a `trace' of the gap associated with the head of a gapping relative clause is not lexically marked in Japanese, and gapping and non-gapping clauses are not explicitly distinguished. Our curre...