| "content": "<table><tr><td>between which tends to be long term and global the hearer's memory for concepts, to a text, and the hearer's memory for sentence. His initial definition of topic as 'any object, person, location, action, state, or time that is mentioned in the</td><td>taken other common ground to begin with as the initial topic; there is no local topics, in what apparently gives a between the recursively definable topic tree of writer and the reader. This is normal unrestricted depth. In this model,</td></tr><tr><td>I have tried to sort categories of these requirements. out two first, cohesionThe second, staging, is speaker oriented. broad The It reflects how the speaker calibrates the importance of different parts of what he himself intends to say. I find it helpful to tie down the discussion of both cohesion and staging to differences in linguistic form; there may be other psychological or philosophical overtones to cohesion and staging that have no such direct repercussions, but getting at those overtones is another matter. One of the areas where we are making progress in the linguistic study of discourse is in seeing how speaker and hearer always seek a common ground of reference. This area, however, is hidden in a terminological thicket. Charles Hockett (1959.201) originally identified it as topic, in which, in his terms, 'the speaker announces a topic and then says something about it.' Gundel (1974) has followed this usage, and I think it the best label for now even though it gets confused with topicalization, which may or may not be part of the same package. Much earlier some of the Prague School theorists (summarized in Danes 1974), and later Halliday (1967), used theme for a similar concept, and now Grosz (1977) has used focus for something not very linguistic form, whfch tends to be short term and local to a segment of text. Her distinction interlocks with the one Halliday and Hasan (1976) make between reference and substitution. What they call reference identifies concepts, objects outside of language, and even pieces of language itself, as they are mentioned once they have been introduced. What they call substitution includes ellipsis; it refers to the reactivation of stretches of speech from earlier in the text in order to talk about situations that have not already been referred to, but which have enough in common with others that have been referred to that the same linguistic expression can apply sentence to be responded to' is probably too inclusive, because it does not take into account Searle's factor of successful reference; but once a text is begun, Searle's boundary condition is no longer needed, because the reference has been established by the text itself. For Schank a new topic is 'derived from the original input but is not identical to it', in that reference may shift from a specific element mentioned in the earlier sentence to the class of which it is a part in the later sentence, or vice versa. The element in the later sentence may also be a different to the new situation. It is the first of these, memory for concept rather than form, from which the speaker appears to take what he hopes is common ground between himself and his hearer. This selection from the field available for global reference is what is behind Gundel's observation that the topic has to be accessible to the hearer. (The most accessible things are characteristically the standard elements of the communication situation: I, you, here, and now.) In the course of a temt, be it monologue or dialogue, the referential common ground that is used as the core of communication may change. This is true of the global topic and apparently of local topics as well. The initial core of reference may be designated very simply, for example by a single noun phrase, with no differentiation of parts or functions at the beginning. Gundel even shows that the topic of some sentences may conceptualization that is like the first in kind; Schank calls this supertopic. It may also be 'a comment that can be inferred from the interaction of two conceptualizations', or metatopic. Schank suggests more specific rules that he hopes will characterize the way topics shift in the course of a text. The key concept, however, is his observation that a sentence out of context cannot be said to have a topic, because for him the topic arises only out of the interaction of adjacent sentences by the process of intersection. If he is right, or close to right, it is reasonable that some of the things that are treated as topic earlier in the text be given different treatment later in the same text, because they are no longer taken as part of the referential common ground between the speaker and hearer. The idea of splitting up the referential field embraced by the topic into higher and lower level topics has be implicit, not mentioned in that sentence, but nevertheless to be taken into account if the sentence is to make sense. Once the topic of a text is put into play, that topic may be developed in at least three different ways that have been described so far in the literature: it may be expanded, shifted, or split. Expansion adds things to the core of reference. Shift adds new referents to the core and leaves others off, so that what is taken as common ground at one point in the taken as common ground earlier. Splitting the core results in local topics being memory for forms. segment of text, and to always involve text differs from what was been treated in two different ways, each ellipsis to be restricted to a local chiefly because she finds the domain of and the second with memory for forms, equate the first with memory for concepts and local topics, however, she tends to antecedent. In her discussion of global come between the pronoun and its though a whole series of local topics has last mentioned half an hour earlier, even it which refers back to a global topic intriguing example (1977.23) of a pronoun recognizes the phenomenon, and gives an of which may be valid in its place. Grosz</td><td>The idea that I am going to refer to as ~ is communication to to succeea, speaker continue this: for and hearer have to establish common ground. This common ground is usually a presumed agreement about the identity of certain objects in the real world. It may also be agreement about certain events or about certain relations that hold. As far as its linguistic expression goes, I think it significant that its formal makeup appears to revolve around nominals most of the time, treating things that are not necessarily objects as if they were. One reason the common ground phenomenon seems so important is that without its narrowing effect, the hearer might not be able to manage the numerous semantic alternatives that could be developed from each expression in the text constructed by the speaker. Gundel has pointed out the utility in this regard of a formulation attempted by Searle (1969.126): For any speaker S, any object X and any predicate P, it is a necessary condition of S's having predicated p of X in the utterance of a sentence containing P, that X should have been successfully referred to in that utterance and all the presuppositions of P should be true of X. Searle's X is very much like what I am calling the topic, in that unless the hearer can relate to it referentially, he can neither agree nor disagree with whatever else may be said about it. Gundel illustrates how even an isolated sentence like George ate a plate o__ff shrimp cannot be assimilated as part of in news stories: consider how impossible it is psychological tests of recall show that to agree or disagree with anything subordinate position in the topic tree like The Giants beat the Dodgers until one knows the occasion. The title of regularly gives worse recall than this piece is Teton: superordinate position. Eyewitness to Disaster. For a reader who knows his geography, Teton identifies a The definition of topic used by Meyer place, while for one w-~ does not, there is at least and Clements is earlier than Gundel's, so a good that one could expect the variance in chance that it is a place name or the name of a person. The idea of their results to be reduced by attention referential common ground gives us for starters to her principles for recognizing topics. a Topic for Clements is more like Halliday's reasonable guess at an event that happened the week before the appearance theme, ordinarily the first thing in the of the magazine, and possibly a place, as sentence. His topic hierarchy comes from a limiting field three rules: within which to place the interpretation of the rest of the message. (i) Topic rule: The text begins with a paragraph Identify the topic of each set clause and simple sentence. off in italic type and quotation marks, in which the speaker is not identified: \"This wet spot on (ii) Old/new rule: the side of the dam started spurting a little water ...\" The Decide whether the topic is new noun phrase that begins the sentence (never previously mentioned) or is definite, as is the dam contained old (mentioned in an earlier within it. The definiteness topic or comment). If new --here suggests that the writer expects the reader to be assign it one level below the able to find the reference because it previous topic. If old --is accessible within the limits already assign it the same level as its set. If he follows first mention. that suggestion and takes Teton as the name of the dam and accepts this as (iii) Coordination rule: identifying something new within that field, his reference succeeds. If a topic is coordinated with (The side is legitimately definite once an earlier topic or comment, we identify the dam by what Halliday assign it the same level as and Hasan call lexical cohesion; that earlier topic or comment. dams have sides.) As far as pinning down a core of reference is concerned, The work of Clements and Meyer lends the text so far has.its topic built up as clearly as credence to the idea that there may be a if the article had begun hierarchy of topics in a text, all much more dully, as for example Last referential in Halliday and Hasan's sense, week at a place called Teton where there is a dam, a wet rather than dependent only on short term spot memory for form. Some observations from appeared on its side. Koine Greek, the vernacular Greek of the that some referential elements appear to Topic shift differs from expansion in The first century before Christ to the third text goes on \"... and I asked my authorities?' She said: 'I think ...'\" first time, as is the mother to whom observers, the wet location, and the time persists as referential core or topic through small references to give an topic. expanded course of over a column. It is built up by the the spot on the dam, the question is addressed. This complex of the the the report is mentioned explicitly for the Here the person who is making don't mother, 'D_oo you think we shou-~ Hotl--i-~-y the century after, appear to bear this out.</td></tr><tr><td>different. topic, theme, and Each used for at least focus, of these three terms, has also been two other kinds of phenomena by reputable lingu{sts, so eventually we are going to have to put together a road map to all the alternatives; but just because the terms are confused is no reason to conclude that no headway is being made. brought into play in relation to global topics; or rather, higher level topics are split into a higher level part and a lower level part, a process which if repeated may yield more than two levels in the same text. Topic expansion is illustrated in a story from Time magazine (June 21, 1976, p. 56). The da--te-of the issue needs to be Meyer (1974) and Clements (1976), however, find the global-local phenomenon operating independently of ellipsis or other substitute-like memory for form. They construct a topical hierarchy consisting of a global topic, whatever local topics are talked about as part of the discussion of the global topic, and whatever lower level topics are talked about as part of the discussion of those</td><td>a real communication unless the hearer has some way of knowing which of the people named George is being referred to; once he knows that, he can react with yes he did or no he didn't or oh, the sign of a new constel-latl--~of -fnformation in memory (Winograd 1972). Grosz has made a useful distinction be dropped from the topic as the progresses; some things that were treated text as part of the common ground in the earlier part of the text are not so treated later. Schank (1977) focuses on the intersection of the referential field of one sentence and that of its successor, and tries to define some (but not all) ways in which that intersection relates to the referential field of the next</td></tr></table>", |
