Discourse Topic and the Representation of Discourse

Content

Presented by Muhammad Al-Moqdad

Supervised by: Dr. M. Mouzahem

Damascus UniversityDepartment of EnglishMAL 2010

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Introduction

• Uses of the term topic:– Sentential topic– Discourse topic

• Characteristics of topic:– Topic information– Presupposition pools– Sentential topic and the presupposition

pool

• Relevance and speaking topically

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Discourse fragments and the notion ‘topic’

• The data studied in discourse analysis is a fragment of discourse, and the discourse analyst has always to decide where the fragment begins and ends => in order to decide what constitutes a satisfactory unit for analysis

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Ways for identifying the boundaries

• Explicit ways:– Formulaic expressionsOnce upon an time . . .

And the lived happily ever after.

• These markers help the analyst decide where the beginning of a coherent fragment of discourse occurs.

• Implicit ways:– The analyst is forced

to depend on intuitive notions about where one part of conversation ends and another begins.

• Speaker-change: it does not necessarily terminate a coherent fragment of conversation

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Intuitive notion of topic

• By appealing to the intuitive notion of topic the analyst can decide which point of speaker-change among the many could be treated as the end of one chunk of the conversation.

• The chunk of conversation in discourse then can be treated as a unit of some kind because it is on a particular topic.

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Intuitive notion of topic

• The notion of topic is intuitively a satisfactory way of describing the unifying principle which makes one stretch of discourse ‘about’ sth & the next stretch ‘about’ sth else.

• Yet, what is the basis for the identification of topic?

– Topic is the most frequently used, unexplained, term in the analysis of discourse

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Uses of the term topic: Sentential topic

• Grammarians’ topic• Hockett: distinction between topic and

comment: sentential topic may coincide with the grammatical subject

Ex. John / ran away• Dahl & Sgall et al: transformational

generative grammar: topicalisation• Givon: in the development of a language,

sentential subjects are derived from grammatical topics.

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We are concerned with what is being talked about!

• This type of topic is unlikely to identifiable as one part of a sentence.

• Morgan: it is not sentences that have topics, but speakers

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Uses of the term topic: discourse topic

• Keenan & Schieffelin• It is not expressible in a simple NP.• Discourse topic is a proposition about

which some claim is made or elicited => represents in any fragment of conversational discourse the topic of the whole fragment

• Their experiments treated topic as equivalent to title

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Topic as Title

• For any text, there is a single correct expression which is the ‘topic’.

• But it should not be too difficult to imagine several different titles for a passage, each of which could equally facilitate comprehension.

• So, in any text there is a number of different way of expressing the topic => represent different judgement of what is being written or talked about in a text.

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It is not as simple as this!

• The difficulty of determining a single phrase or sentence as the topic of a piece of printed text is increased when fragments of conversational discourse are considered.

• In any conversation, what is being talked about will be judged differently at different points and the participants themselves may not have identical views of what each is talking about.

There is no such thing as the one correct expression of the topic for any

fragment of discourse.There will be always a set of possible

expressions of the topic.Tyler: the topic can only be one

possible paraphrase of a sequence of utterances

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Reasons why Discourse analysts study this notion ‘Topic’

• It is the central organising principle for a lot of discourse

• It enables the analyst to explain why several sentences or utterances should be considered together as a set of some kind, separate from another set.

• It provides a means of distinguishing fragments of discourse which are felt to be good, coherent.

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Characterisation of the topic:Topic framework

• The analyst can determine what aspect of the context are explicitly reflected in the text as the formal record of the utterance

• Activated features of context: aspects which are directly reflected in the text which need to be called upon to interpret the text

• They constitute the contextual framework within which the topic is constituted

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Topic framework

• Aspects of the speakers assumptions about his hearer’s knowledge must be considered in relation to the elements which the speaker does make explicit in his contribution.

• Any consideration of topic involves asking why the speaker what he said in a particular discourse situation. Coulthard, Sacks: there is a constant analysis in conversation of what is said in terms of why that now and to me.

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Topic framework

• Certain elements which constrain the topic can be determined before the discourse begins; they are part of the context of a speech event.

• In relation to contextual features to a particular speech event, however, we are particularly interested in only those activated features of context pertaining to the fragment of discourse being studied.

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Topic framework

• The topic framework consists of elements derivable from the physical context and from the discourse domain of any discourse fragment.

• These elements are a means of making explicit some of the assumptions a speaker can make about his hearer’s knowledge – we are talking about the total knowledge which the speaker believes he shares with his/her hearer.

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Presupposition pools

• Venneman proposes: for a discourse, there is a presupposition pool which contains information constituted from general knowledge, from the situative context of the discourse, and from the completed part of the discourse itself.

• Within the presupposition pool for any discourse, there is a set of discourse subjects and each discourse is, in a sense, about its discourse subjects.

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Presupposition pools

• The number of the discourse subjects in a presupposition pool shared by participants in a discourse, particularly participants who know each other well, is potentially large.

• Selecting the discourse subjects must have to do with their relevance to the particular discourse fragment under consideration.

• This relevance must be those to which reference is made in the text of the discourse.

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Sentential topic & the presupposition pool

• Presupposition pool shared by participants restricts the analyst investigation to describing the relationship between pairs of sentences.

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Relevance and speaking topically

• Topic framework represents the area of overlap in the knowledge which has been activated and is shared by the participants at a particular point in a discourse.

• Once these have been identified, the analyst has some basis for making judgements of the relevance with regard to conversational contributions.

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Relevance and speaking topically

• This technical term is derived from the conversational maxim proposed by Grice 1975:

• They have to do with: relevance of conversational contributions.

• But they are relevant to what?!–Make your contribution relevant in terms

of the existing topic framework.

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Relevance and speaking topically

• We can capture this by the expression ‘speaking topically’

• It is an obvious feature of casual conversation in which each participant contributes equally and there is no fixed direction for the conversation to go.

• Speaking on a topic: the participants are concentrating their talk on one particular entity, individual or issue.

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Relevance and speaking topically

• In practice any conversational fragment will exhibit patterns of talk in which both speaking topically and speaking on topic are present.

• Both forms are based on the existing topic framework, but the distinction derives from what each individual speaker treats as the salient element in the existing topic framework.

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Conclusion:

• We have tried to list the connexions existing across contributions in this discourse fragment to emphasise the ways in which speakers make what they’re talking about fit into the framework which represents what we (as discourse participants) are talking about in conversational discourse.

• For the analyst, these connexions can signal the coherence relations which make each contribution relevant to the discourse as a whole.

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Thanks for listening