Статья из журнала Theoretical Linguistics, 2004, #
30. - p.163–201.Discourse Topic is a familiar but also elusive concept. Researchers like van Kuppevelt (1995) have thought that discourse topics must be an intrinsic feature of the logical form of a coherent discourse;
they are organizing principles of discourse interpretation. SDRT, the formal theory of discourse interpretation that I have worked on, has a much more limited view of discourse topic; discourse topic plays an important role in connection with certain discourse relations like Narration.
Other discourse relations, in particular those that exploit the logical or semantic structure of the discourse constituents they relate like Parallel and Contrast (Asher 1993, Asher and Lascarides 2003), have something similar to a topic as an intrinsic part of their semantics. the notion of topic is not a
homogeneous one but varies depending on the discourse relations used viz., on the discourse context
I’ll then give another account of the relation between contrastive topic and other information structure indicators and discourse topics for Narration.
