Discontinuity of Conversational Topics *

This paper studies the structuring of conversational topics in order to examine the linguistic manifestation of topic discontinuity which arises when the speech participants start a new subject. Since the change of topic is an important event in discourse, the speaker who initiates the change is found to pause longer and produce more repairing utterances. Moreover, markers for time, event, and character discontinuity are also used at the topic-shift boundary. Concerning the content of the new subject, about half of the new topics are introduced immediately without background information. Alternatively, a new topic can be oriented by background information in various ways. The most common way is by asking questions because they typically invite other speakers to converse about the new subject