TOPICITY VS THEMATICITY - TOPIC-PROMINENCE IN IMPROMPTU SPANISH DISCOURSE

In spontaneous discourse, speakers of standard Castilian Spanish regul arly use 'pragmatic mode' rather than 'grammatical mode' (Givon, 1979) - i.e., they use less grammatically coded utterances - to signal topi cs/topic shifts. There is a difference in pragmatic function between t he use of these overtly marked topics (cf. Barnes, 1985: 9) and themat ic stagers such as utterance-initial adverbials/sentence adverbs whose information status and textual shift function are sometimes still und ifferentiated from those of topics (Virtanen, 1992). Grammaticalised t opics (Reinhart, 1982) are not discussed here, as topic-prominence is not the issue with these. A further discourse-orientation point concer ning the Spanish language arises from data in radio and TV interviews/ university transcripts of face-to-face interviews in standard Castilia n which show that many topic forms are followed by predications of the 'noanaphor' type (Barnes, 1985: 10, 31), characterised by the absence of syntactic co-reference, though not of semantic coding, between top ic and predication. Such patterning is regularly used in this language variety and may mean that a topic-prominent pragmatic speech mode exi sts in Castilian Spanish. Research is needed to ascertain how language -specific this phenomenon is.