When we compare the functions of discourse topics and points of departure in a discourse setting, we note that whereas for nominal topics the integration function is primary, for points of departure the access
function is primary; as shown in Figure 14.
Integration function Access function
Topics general, primary
occasional Points of departure
occasional general, primary
Figure 14: Functions of topics and points of departure
There is a type of expression which in some languages as in subject-prominent English comes out as an adverbial point of departure and in other languages as in topic-prominent Mandarin comes out as a
nominal topic. Chafe 1976:51, citing the English example In Dwinelle Hall, people are always getting lost, comments that “Chinese would not require the in,” that is, there would be a left-detached topic
expression as nominal point of departure where English has an adverbial point of departure. In an example from Korean cited by Li and Thompson 1976:492, the inner level, that is, the clause, is
presentational: ‘[The present time, [there are many schools]’. In examples such as these, the left-detached topic serves both the access function and the integration function: integration, in the sense that the
predication ‘people are always getting lost’ is inseparable from the place ‘Dwinelle Hall’, and ‘there are many schools’ is inseparable from ‘the present time’.
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Nevertheless, the left detachment is associated primarily with access, whether or not the expression is nominal or adverbial.
3.3.5 Sentences with different levels of topic structure
The sentence, or rather the utterance, is generally taken to be the minimum textual span for topics: dependent clauses can occur in information structure roles, but since they are generally presuppositional
already stored; §2.3.3, they often do not have their own information structure. Some languages do occasionally allow dependent clauses limited information structure options.
In “topic-prominent” languages Li and Thompson 1976, it is common for there to be a sentence topic outside of clause structure. If the grammatical subject within the clause is taken as default topic,
then such a sentence could be said to have two topics, an outer one and an inner one, with the comment of the
OUTER TOPIC
being composed of the
INNER TOPIC
and its comment Lambrecht 1994, ch. 4; Dooley and Levinsohn 2001:69. The following example in literal translation from Chinese is cited by Li and
Thompson 1976:462: [‘Those trees, [trunks big’]]. The outer, marked topic is ‘those trees’, which gives access to a space within which the main clause ‘trunks big’ can be processed. ‘Trunks’, as
grammatical subject, is an inner topic with unmarked expression. A similar thing can occur in English: [Beans, [I can’t stand them]]. In the related sentence [Beans, [I can’t stand]], beans remains within the
clause as direct object, but fronting makes it into a marked topic expression §3.3.1.
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Sometimes one finds sentences with two outer topics:
• The following sentence from French has two outer topics, thus three levels of topic structure
Langacker 2001b: [Pierre, [sa soeur, [je la déteste]]] ‘Peter, his sister, I hate her.’ Pierre ‘Peter’ is an outer topic which gives access to his family relations. Sa soeur ‘his sister’, in turn, is an outer topic
with respect to ‘I hate her’, whose grammatical subject ‘I’ can be taken as an inner topic.
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Languages in which there is little syntactic distinction between adverbial and nominal points of departure may be “topic-prominent” in the sense of Li and Thompson 1976.
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When there are two topics as in the above examples, the comment of the outer one is composed of the inner topic with its comment. Since comment is predicate focus and there are distinct comments on two levels, how do we
interpret Lambrecht’s 1994:133 statement that “a clause can have only one focus domain?” I interpret it as being about a single level of information structure. As such it requires that the focus domain for an inner level be
contained within the focus domain of the next outer level. As in the examples being discussed, descending levels narrow down the focus.
• Another example is the following, which is from Yahoo News Asia—AFP, Fri Apr 22, 1:32 PM
ET: ‘Japan’s Koizumi apologizes for wartime aggression, confirms Hu meeting.’ The example, a Chinese official’s reaction to the Japanese apology, was apparently spoken in English, but shows
influence from Chinese. “A Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman said both sides were still trying to arrange the meeting and gave China’s first official reaction to Koizumi’s apology. ‘[Regarding 60
years ago, [the great damage it has caused in Asian countries, including China, [we welcome Koizumi’s attitude]]],’ he told journalists in Jakarta.” Here again there are three levels of topic
structure: the two outer “reference point” topics and the grammatical subject we as inner topic.
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In this example, as with the preceding one, the inner topic is first person, hence the topic of the base
space consisting of the encoding situation, and may well be a topic of the actual discourse. In general, the inner topic, being unmarked, is more likely than an outer topic to be an established discourse
topic.
In discussing the following example Lambrecht 1994:147–150 describes
PRIMARY
and
SECONDARY TOPICS
of utterances. From the examples he gives, it appears that this either involves two levels of discourse topics or a discourse topic plus a center of attention within a micro-level. He first
example is as follows:
Example text 21: Letter about thesis, excerpt Lambrecht 1994:147
01 Why am I in an up mood? 02 Mostly its a sense of relief of having finished a first draft of my thesis
and feeling OK at least about the time I spent writing this. 03 The product I feel less good about.
Lambrecht says that in sentence 03, I is primary topic and the product as secondary topic. We note that both expressions have a claim to be sentence topics, I because it occurs as subject an unmarked topic
expression and the product because it is fronted. Although the example text does not indicate whether the letter-writer continued talking about “the product,” it seems likely that these two topics are actually
discourse topics on two levels: first, “the whole passage … is about the letter-writer and his feelings” loc. cit., so that I can be taken as a paragraph or episode topic here; then, the product seems likely to be
topical in some subpart of that paragraph or episode. Incidentally, the product is in contrast to the work involved, finishing which left the writer “in an up mood.”
Lambrecht’s second example is the following:
Example text 22: Dialog about John and Rosa Lambrecht 1994:148
Q: What ever became of John? A: He married Rosa, but he didn’t really love her.
In discussing the answer, in particular its second clause, Lambrecht identifies John as primary topic and Rosa as secondary topic, their respective topic expressions being he and her. Once again, the primary
topic is a discourse topic: “no doubt the answer…is intended primarily as information about John” loc. cit.. The reason Lambrecht gives for describing Rosa as secondary topic is that the clause “has the effect
of increasing our knowledge about Rosa, by informing us that she was not loved by her husband” loc. cit.. That is, whereas the dialog as a whole is conceptually about John, the clause in question is about
Rosa in the sense of semantic aboutness, adding to knowledge §2.2.5. There is no apparent topic construal, either conceptually on the discourse level or formally on the clause level. This kind of
“secondary topic” appears to be simply a minimal-coding reference to a recent-reference center of attention §2.4.2.
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Levinsohn p.c. gives the following example from a text in Muan Mande, Ivory Coast dealing with a field belonging to the narrator’s father: ‘We went and, [my father Zeiba, [the place, [we arrived there]]]’.
We consider three further examples of a paragraph topic with a recent-reference center of attention.
The first is a text fragment from Cherryh 1988:24 which is discussed in Hewitt 1995:337: Vanye set his own foot in the stirrup, stepped up, and rested his leg across the low cantle and blanket roll till he could
get hold of the man and haul him upright enough. Then he slid down behind him…. In this passage, Vanye is paragraph topic and “the man” is a recent-reference center of attention. It is possible to code
both with minimal coding without ambiguity because selectional restrictions make the necessary distinctions.
In the nonnarrative example below, the numbered lines correspond to graphical paragraphs in the original:
Example text 23: “A moveable feast,” excerpt Booth 2004
01 The idea of building one’s own PC has long been popular. Most end-users would happily open up their desktop PC and install a new graphics card or CD writer, but for some reason laptops have
long been sacrosanct. Nobody ever took a screwdriver to a laptop. 02 By the same token, nobody ever dared challenge the configuration choices that were given to them
by Hewlett-Packard HP or IBM. Reassuringly expensive brand names tended to dominate. 03 This is all changing now. It is over a year since Ingram launched its Build Your Own Notebooks
BYON campaign. It followed it up with a reseller seminar aimed at highlighting the ‘lucrative margin opportunities’ available to resellers.
04 If you are able to configure and build your own high-performance laptops, you can make a fortune, Ingram said.
Preceding parts of this text had mentioned Ingram a computer company twice, once right before the portion that is cited. Graphical paragraphs 03 and 04 appear to make up a single discourse paragraph,
in which Ingram could be considered a paragraph topic. In the sentence beginning It followed it up, then, the first it refers to the paragraph topic Ingram while the second one refers to the BYON campaign, a
recent-reference center of attention.
A final example from Chinese is presented in simplified orthography:
Example text 24: “Lao Qian,” excerpt Chen 1984, cited in Van Valin and LaPolla 1997:231–232
01 Lao Qian
i
you zheme ge piqi, Old Qian have such CL disposition
‘Old Qian
i
has just such a disposition:
02 pro
i
wen pengyou
j
yao shenme
dongxi
k
ask friend
want whatsomething thing
if he
i
asks for something
k
from his
i
friendss
j
,
03 pro
j
like jiu
dei gei
pro
i
pro
k
at.once then
must give heshethey
j
must give it
k
to him
i
.
04 pro
j
bu gei pro
i
pro
k
,
not give
if heshethey
j
don’t give it
k
to him
i
,
05 pro
i
jiu juede pro
j
shi qiao-bu-qi ta
i
then feel
COP look-down-on 3sg he
i
feels that heshethey
j
don’t think much of him
i
06 pro
i
ji tian
bu gaoxing.
several day
not pleased
and he
i
would be displeased for a few days.’ Minimal coding in Chinese is zero, indicated here by pro. The paragraph topic is Lao Qian Van Valin
and LaPolla 1997:232, and there are two recent-reference centers of attention: his friends and something he might want from them. For the subject of 02 Lao Qian is the only activated referent.
According to selectional restrictions and the cultural schema frame of asking and giving, his friends
must be the subject of 03. The same selectional restrictions hold for 04, and for 05 and 06 another frame predicts that Lao Qian is the subject and his friends are direct object. Thus, even though “massive
nonspecification of arguments occurs in Chinese discourse,” this need not result in massive ambiguity, “being inferred on the basis of semantic and pragmatic knowledge and of information present in the
discourse itself” Li and Thompson 1979:317, 334.
On Lambrecht’s analysis which is followed by Van Valin and LaPolla 1997, Example text 24 has not only a secondary sentence topic but also a tertiary sentence topic. There are likely other texts that
would require a quaternary sentence topic. Since the only topic that is construed in this passage, either conceptually or formally, is the paragraph topic, there seems to be no need to posit this type of secondary
or tertiary sentence topics. Instead, one can simply make use of the commonly-noted fact that minimum coding can be used for recent-reference centers of attention as well as for paragraph topics §2.4.2.
A more interesting question is how speaker and addressees can be expected to keep so many referents at the center of their attention at once. What does “center of their attention” mean if so many referents can
be there at once? How can addressees keep the references straight? By what rules can the same linguistic signal be used simultaneously for different and distinct kinds of referents?
There are probably practical considerations that reduce potential confusion. •
Minimal coding forms sometimes present distinctions, such as gender differences in English personal pronouns, which disambiguate reference.
• There are usually not more than three participants active at any point in a narrative Grimes 1975:261.
269. •
When the number of active referents is large, coding weight increases accordingly. Still a basic linguistic problem remains, of the multilevel use of minimum coding in a single context.
This phenomenon already has a long history in linguistics. Two lines of research are mentioned here. Charlotte Linde 1979:351 found that, “in discourse, attention is actually focused on at least two levels
simultaneously—the particular node of the discourse under construction and, also, the discourse as a whole. Thus, if the focus of attention indicates where we are, we are actually at two places at once. In
fact, it is likely that the number is considerably greater than two, particularly in more complicated discourse types.” Grosz and her associates Grosz and Sidner 1986, Grosz et al. 1995 have likewise
devoted years of study to this. The following is quoted from a project summary Grosz n.d.: “There are two levels of attentional state. The global level is concerned with the relations between discourse
segments [possibly either macro-level or micro-level units; RAD] and the ways in which attention shifts between them; it depends on intentional structure. The local level is concerned with changes of attention
within discourse segments.” The term “centering” is used for the local level. “Our current research addresses four central open problems that remain: 1 integration of centering with other processes for
interpreting pronouns; 2 application of centering to additional context-dependent linguistic forms e.g. ellipsis, accentuation; 3 the interaction between centering and discourse segmentation; 4 formulation
of computationally tractable rules constraining center transitions. In addressing these issues we are also investigating how to incorporate centering into a general architecture for intra-segment discourse
processing.”
One way to think of multilevel uses of attention involves multitasking, possibly similar to what happens when people drive a car: they generally keep their attention on the road, but for brief periods
switch it to something else such as the radio or a roadside sign. Language may present evidence that the multilevel use of attention is constrained by structural aspects of conceptual organization:
• It seems possible that recent-reference centers of attention in use at a given time are always or
commonly limited to the current micro-level unit, the current step in the paragraph schema §2.6.2. This would limit the number of possible referents to what is in the current “viewing frame”
Langacker 2001:151.
• It may be that only one level of discourse topic can be a center of attention at at given time. That may
in every case be a paragraph topic. This would be indicated by the observation that active concepts tend to become semiactive as they cross paragraph boundaries §§2.4.1, 2.6.3.
Thus, it may be that paragraph structure may be useful in explaining low-level options for directing attention.
3.4 Discourse themes 3.4.1 The role of discourse themes
