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Book: Contrastive Discourse Analysis

Chapter: Topic and topicality in text: A contrastive study of English and Spanish narrative texts

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.21775

Blurb:

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.

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