Topic and the representation of discourse content

1. Topic boundary markers

1.1. Written discourse. - Paragraphs: written discourse is divided into paragraphs whose boundaries are marked by indentations.

1.2. Spoken discourse -Paratones: The speech paragraph or "paratone" is identified by boundary markers.

2. Discourse topic and the representation of discourse content

2.1. The representation of discourse content is the components of discourse topic.

2.2. The representation of discourse content is also known with the notion of proposition

2.3. Proposition = representation of semantic content.

3. Problems with the proposition-based representation of discourse content

3.1. The problem of reconstructing the underlying proposition(s) for a sentence.

3.2. Computing the intended meaning of a speaker/writer

4. Representing text-content as a network

4.1. Beaugrande (1980) offers an alternative approach, which represents content in the form of a network. For him, this is idealisation of the actual cognitive entites involved.

4.2. It should be apparent that with longe text, the network will be more complex, hence the difficulty in terms of application.

5. Memory for text-content: story-grammars

5.1. is the way of the content of the text is processed comprehension, stored in memory and subsequently recalled.

6. Sentential topic

6.1. Topic = Subject

6.2. Comment = Predicates

7. Discourse topic

7.1. Topic framewook

7.1.1. Physical content

7.1.2. discourse domain

7.2. Presupposition pool

7.2.1. Definition

7.2.2. Example

7.2.3. How to define the presupposition pool

7.3. Sentential topic & the presupposition pool

8. Relevance and speaking topically

8.1. Relevance

8.2. Speaking topically

8.3. Speaking on a topic

9. Speaker’s topic

9.1. It is a feature of a lot of conversations that “topics” are not fixed beforehand, but negotiated in the process of conversing.