Topic discontinuity in chinese conversations

• Main Authors: Chang , Liting, 張俐婷
• Other Authors: Chui , Kawai
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/34172025706785574464

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言研究所 === 92 === The present study aims at investigating topic discontinuity in Chinese daily conversations. This pragmatic phenomenon is discussed from three perspectives. First, since changing topics requires more cognitive effort, the speaker who initiates the change is likely to produce longer pauses and repairing utterances, and is fairly unlikely to be overlapped. Second, the speaker can move to a new topic directly, or orient a new topic in various ways. Questions are the most common backgrounded clauses at the topic-shift boundary because they function to invite other speakers to join the new subject. Third, the speaker most frequently draws on some contextual resource to guide other speakers into conversing about the new topic. The most common way is by recycling the prior text. Speech disfluency, grounding, and contextual resources are also found to distinguish various levels of conversational topics. The highest level of conversational topics are usually grounded in general background knowledge, produced with more disfluency, and tend to begin with background information. The other levels of conversational topics, however, are more likely to arise from prior text, more fluently brought up, and do not use background information more often than foreground information at the topic-initial position. Despite the above-mentioned differences, the various levels of conversational topics are similar in several aspects. For example, backgrounded clauses at the topic-shift boundary are mainly questions; topics grounded in prior text predominantly maintain referential continuity across the topical boundary