A Data-based Analysis of Topic Continuity and Information Status in English

초록

This study aims to examine the distributional patterns of topic continuity and identify the linguistic factors that characterize a relation between the choice of a discourse topic and the grammatical coding of topic continuity in English. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to find out linguistic tendencies or regularities underlying topic continuity in English discourse. The data-based analysis reveals that particular patterns of topic chains tend to be selected or preferred in discourse to increase the pragmatic prominence of a topic, and the information status (i.e. ‘given’ or ‘new’) and grammatical structure of a discourse topic affect the degree of topic continuity and the flow of discourse in a predictable way. This study also suggests that the grammatical form and information status of a discourse topic is closely related to the degree of topic continuity, and thus the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic consistency of a topic chain contributes to the effectiveness of topic preservation and discourse organization. Finally, this study claims that the preference of a particular type of topic chain might contribute to the effectiveness of topic continuity and discourse organization, facilitating language comprehension and language production.

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