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Article published In:
Models of Discourse Units in Romance Languages
Edited by Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga, Vahram Atayan and Sybille Große
[Revue Romane 53:1] 2018
► pp. 30–62

The definition of the TOPIC within Language into Act Theory and its identification in spontaneous speech corpora

| Università degli Studi di Firenze
| Università degli Studi di Firenze

The paper presents the definition of the TOPIC information unit within the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT) and the prosodic and informational criteria used for its recovery in spontaneous speech corpora: Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and American English. The TOPIC develops the specific function of field of application of the illocutionary force accomplished by the COMMENT unit, it is performed through a prefix prosodic unit and precedes the Comment. The TOPIC must be coherent with the set of requirements determined by the illocutionary force of the Comment and adequate to the speaker-addressee relation. TOPIC mostly correlates in spoken corpora with NP and ADVP and must be functionally distinguished from “postponed Topic” (APPENDIX in the L-ACT framework). However, corpora also show a good percentage of modal expressions filling its prosodic and distributional conditions.

Keywords: topic, speech, prosody, information function, illocution
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1How this paper is organized
    • 1.2The utterance in the L-AcT framework
    • 1.3The information pattern
  • 2.The Topic
    • 2.1The prosodic criterion for the identification of the Topic within the utterance
    • 2.2Identifying the properties of the Topic
  • 3.The syntax and semantics of the Topic
    • 3.1The syntax of Topic
    • 3.2The semantics of Topic
  • 4.Some conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.00005.cre
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