How interactional needs shape information structure: An analysis of the discourse functions of topicalization in three L2 varieties of English
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Sven Leuckert
Abstract
Topicalization refers to the sentence-initial placement of constituents other than the subject (see, e.g., Lambrecht 1994; Birner & Ward 2009) and has recently gained more attention in particular with regard to its frequency, forms, and functions in L2 and learner varieties of English (cf. Lange 2012; Winkle 2015; Leuckert 2017). Specific interactional needs, such as the intention of establishing topic continuity in the discourse, may motivate speakers to deviate from the canonical SVX pattern of English sentences. Furthermore, speakers may choose to emphasize or contrast information which has not previously been mentioned in the discourse. Therefore, this paper argues that cognitive, pragmatic, emotiveaffective, and social factors (cf. Schmid 2016) all play an important role for topicalization, but certain communicative goals may lead to speakers ignoring the cognitive status of information by topicalizing brand-new or unused information. Furthermore, it is shown in this paper that topicalized constituents which serve to create topic continuity (and are, therefore, highly salient in the discourse) tend to persist longer in the subsequent discourse than topicalized constituents which serve other discourse functions.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- Metapragmatic appositions in German talk-in-interaction
- How interactional needs shape information structure: An analysis of the discourse functions of topicalization in three L2 varieties of English
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Introduction
- Metapragmatic appositions in German talk-in-interaction
- How interactional needs shape information structure: An analysis of the discourse functions of topicalization in three L2 varieties of English
- The encoding of motion events in football and cycling live text commentary: A corpus linguistic analysis
- Can Macromania be explained linguistically? Beneath the morphological boundary: A sketch of subconscious manipulation strategies in Emmanuel Macron’s political discourses
- Nonmanual downtoning in German co-speech gesture and in German Sign Language
- Cognitive cultural models at work: The case of German-speaking Switzerland
- Cognitive descriptions in a corpus-based dictionary of German paronyms
- A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German
- Idiomatic singleton or prototype? A productivity analysis of be-adj-and-v
- Networks of meanings: Complementing collostructional analysis by cluster and network analyses
- A frame-analysis of the interplay of grammar and cognition in emission verbs
- Bridging the gap: Toward a cognitive semantic analysis of the Lithuanian superlexical prefix be-
