TOPIC VERSUS COHESION IN THE PREDICTION OF CAUSAL ORDERING IN ENGLISHCONVERSATION

We tested Schiffrin's (1985) hypothesis that the choice between ''CAUS E so RESULT'' sequences and ''RESULT because CAUSE'' sequences is prim arily determined by topic continuity (topic being operationally define d as grammatical subject) against British conversational data from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English printed in Svartvik and Quirk (1 980). Our test produced results similar to those produced by Schiffrin 's test of the hypothesis against her U.S. data. We hypothesized that noun phrase cohesion would be a better predictor of causal ordering th an subject topicality and achieved a significantly better prediction r ate (57.5% vs. 21.5% of 200 causal sequences). This study supports Sch lobinski and Schutze-Coburn's (1992) critique of the use of topic as a uniting and distorting metaphor for a number of different formal, sem antic, and pragmatic patterns, such as grammatical relation, role, and cohesion. However, we also conclude, stopping short of metaphorizing cohesion as topic, that our study and Schiffrin's study reveal a speci al cohesive functional load concentrating in grammatical subject.