Text Analysis Based on Discourse Topic: Methodological Contributions

Abstract

This paper provides methodological contributions to the text analysis that is developed in Textual-Interactive Grammar (TIG), a type of analysis based on the analytical category of discourse topic. Specifically, the purpose of the paper is to discuss: (i) the elaboration of meta-discourse topics during the construction of texts; (ii) a methodology for naming the referents that work as topics in a text. The corpus comprises descriptions, experience narratives, and opinion reports, material selected from IBORUNA database. Aiming to contribute to the development of TIG, the article argues that textual construction sometimes deals with meta-discourse topics in which interlocutors are concentrated on negotiating the topic of the text. In addition, the paper discusses that a referent with topic status can be described by means of: (i) the identification of a referential expression that makes it explicit on the text surface; (ii) the nominalization of a predication that is present in the text; or (iii) the inference of that referent. The article concludes that discourse topics make evident the existence of an intrinsic relationship between text formulation and interaction, and that the different possibilities of describing topics corroborate the referent nature of each topic in a text.