Ra-marking in Persian has been a hotly debated topic over five decades. The postposition is primarily a definite marker of accusative objects in Standard Persian. However, the possibility for it to accompany indefinite accusative objects has paved the way for the emergence of further accounts such as ra being a marker of specificity, topicality, or identifiability. In colloquial Persian, the postposition also appears in displacement constructions where it marks clause-external possessors or obliques serving as so-called topics. In this paper, we argue that ra-marking is not unique to topical DOs and displaced NPs. A ra-marked NP also partakes in the constitution of focus structure while the postposition is taken to be an identifiability marker. We situate our account within a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework to delineate that ra-marking at the Persian left-periphery is an example par excellence of the (mis)match between identifiability as a discourse-based concept and the pragmatic functions that the ra-marked displaced NPs serve in information structure. It becomes clear that a displaced NP legitimately plays an array of information-structural roles varying from a primary and secondary topic to a contrastive focus.

中文翻译：

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波斯左边缘的以 Ra 为中心的结构：一个 RRG 帐户

镭- 波斯语标记在过去的五年中一直是一个争论不休的话题。后置词主要是标准波斯语宾格宾语的明确标记。然而，它伴随不定宾格宾语的可能性为进一步的解释铺平了道路，例如拉作为特异性、时事性或可识别性的标记。在口语波斯语中，后置词也出现在位移结构中，它标记从句外部拥有者或间接作为所谓的话题。在本文中，我们认为拉-标记并非局部 DO 和置换 NP 所独有。A拉-marked NP也参与了焦点结构的构成，而后置词被认为是可识别性标记。我们将我们的帐户置于角色和参考语法 (RRG) 框架中以描述拉-在波斯语的左边缘标记是一个典型的例子，说明作为基于话语的概念的可识别性和语用功能之间的（错误）匹配拉-marked 置换的 NPs 服务于信息结构。很明显，流离失所的 NP 合法地扮演了一系列信息结构角色，从主要和次要主题到对比焦点。