Contrastive Discourse Analysis - Functional and Corpus Perspectives - Maite Taboada
Topic and topicality in text: A contrastive study of English and Spanish narrative texts
Contrastive Discourse Analysis - Functional and Corpus Perspectives - Maite Taboada
Raquel Hildalgo
Angela Downing
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Description
In this chapter, topic and topicality are explored through the application of a model of analysis to a bilingual sample of English and Spanish written narrative texts in equivalent genres. The results of the analysis show that aboutness topics and frame-setting topics are cross-linguistically stable categories, although language-specific differences are found in the syntactic coding, for instance in how Spanish marks topicless sentences.