Week 5: Topic and Representation of Discourse Content

The treatment of ‘topic’ as a grammatical term, identifying a constituent in the structure of a sentence is also noticeable in the work of grammarians.Transformational generative grammar would also account for the structure of example in terms of a movement. The notion of ‘topic’ is clearly an intuitively satisfactory way of describing the unifying principle which makes one stretch of discourse about something and the next stretch aboutsomething else, for it is appealed to very frequently in the discourse analysis. The basis for the identification of ‘topic’ is rarely made explicit. In fact, ‘topic’ could be described as the most frequently used, unexplained, term in analysis of discourse.

The notion of topic is used in different ways. One important distinction is the one between discourse topic (what a part of a discourse is about) and sentence topic (what is predicated about an entity in a sentence). The terms 'sentence topic' and 'discourse topic' are dealt with in this section. 

Download Files

topic-n-rep-of-discourse-topic.pdf (5.42 MB )

sentence-topic-and-discourse-topic.pdf (0.15 MB )