Topic Continuity in Discourse
non-fiction work by Thomas Givon
Topic Continuity in Discourse—subtitled A Quantitative Cross Language Study—is a book edited by Talmy Givón, with contributions by himself and other experts in various languages. It is part of the series Typological Studies in Language (a supplement series to the academic journal Studies in Language) and was published by John Benjamins in 1983.
The book presents a cross-linguistic hierarchy of natural language "syntactic coding of topic accessibility" (including, for example, discourse participant prominence). Givón describes the aim of the research, documented in the book, as "the rather ambitious goal ... to define, in a preliminary but cross-linguistically stable fashion, the basic principles of iconicity underlying the syntactic coding of the topic identification domain."
Givón's starting point was his previously published (1978, 1979, 1981 and 1982) one-dimensional scale. As listed by him, from "most continuous/accessible topic" to "most discontinuous/inaccessible topic" this was as follows:
zero anaphora
unstressed-bound pronouns and grammatical agreement
stressed-independent pronouns
right-dislocated definite noun phrases (NP)
neutral-ordered NPs
left-dislocated NPs
Y-moved NPs (or "contrastive topicalization")
cleft and focus constructions
referential indefinite NPs
The language specific studies provided in the book are on Japanese, Amharic, Ute, Biblical Hebrew, Latin-American Spanish, written English, spoken English, Hausa and Chamorro. The data from these languages were analysed according to a common methodology, explained by Givón in the introduction to the book, and agreed upon by all the other contributors. The methodology involved quantitative measurements, which although statistical, were designed to be repeatable and applicable to any language.
See also
Cognitive science
Context
Human universals
Language universals
Pragmatics
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Universal grammar
Notes and references
Bibliography
Givón, Talmy. Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross Language Study.
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