Topic Continuity in Discourse
Topic Continuity in Discourse—subtitled A Quantitative Cross Language Study—is a book edited by Talmy Givón, with contributions by himself and other experts in various languages. It is part of the series Typological Studies in Language, a supplement series to the academic journal Studies in Language. The book was published by John Benjamins in 1983.
The book presents a cross-linguistic heirarchy of natural language "syntactic coding of topic accessibility" (including, for example, discourse participant prominence).[1] Givón describes the aim of the research, documented in the book, as "the rather ambitious goal ... to define, in a preliminary but cross-liguistically stable fashion, the basic principles of iconicity underlying the syntactic coding of the topic identification domain."[2]
Givón's starting point was his previously published (1978, 1979, 1981 and 1982) one dimensional scale. As listed by him, from "most continuous/accessible topic" to "most discontinuous/inaccessible topic" this was as follows.[3]
- zero anaphora
- unstressed/bound pronouns or grammatical agreement
- stressed/independent pronouns
- R-dislocated DEF-NP's
- neutral-ordered DEF-NP's
- L-dislocated DEF-NP's
- Y-moved NP's ('contrastive topicalization')
- cleft/focus constructions
- referential indefinite NP's
See also
- Cognitive science
- Context
- Cotext
- Human universals
- Pragmatics
- Psycholinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Universal Grammar
Notes and references
Bibliography
- Givón, Talmy. Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross Language Study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983.
External links
- Topic Continuity in Discourse — overview of book provided by publisher
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