Title: Identifying Topic Management Signals: A Taxonomy
Many early studies in Discourse Analysis focussed on the identification of discourse markers, some of which signalled topics (Svartvik 1980, Crow 1983, Schiffrin 1987, Fraser 1990). More recent analyses have attempted to formulate taxonomies to capture global and local topic-signalling devices (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992, Tsui 1994).
This paper will present ongoing research on a taxonomy which aims to identify topic signalling devices at local and global levels, together with moves for managing topic within spoken transactional discourse.
The taxonomy emerges from the empirical analysis of a corpus of naturally-occurring speech. Data from the texts have been classified according to different categories in an attempt to reveal the relation between form and function in the management of discourse topics.