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This article seeks to explore the possibility of minimizing the role of discourse topic (DT). Nick Asher states that discourse topics for narration in SDRT should summarize and abstract away from the logical structure of the constituents they are topics of. For a variety of purposes they are also needed as constituents in the discourse structure. Asher thus cites two traditional roles for DT, and expands another one. The traditional roles are in the semantics of Narration, to explain the incoherence of discourses containing Narration; and in constraining attachment, to explain how some parts of discourse are closed off for attachment. The expanded role is in plural anaphora, explaining resolution possibilities. The rest of this paper discusses these roles in turn, arguing in each case that DT's role could be reduced still further.

In this paper, we present an account of the interpretation of it-cleft constructions that attempts to draw together the apparently diverse factors of aspect, information structure, syntax, and presupposition. We begin with the observation (due to Prince 1978) that some clefts have the effect of "backgrounding" the information they convey, and that, in addition, clefts appear to indicate that this information is in some sense "known fact." We also add the observation that in some contexts clefts can induce temporal reversals in the interpretation of the narrative order of events and note that clefts appear to limit the range of coherence relations that can be inferred bet wan their content and that of the preceding discourse. We argue that these effects arise out of the way cleft content is incorporated into the existing discourse context; further, we suggest that the integration of cleft con tent is further influenced by the individual semantic, pragmatic, and informational profile of the cleft concerned. Our account draws on the notion of clefts as state-making devices: that is, they introduce an eventuality description with stative aspect, due to the presence of copular be as main verb. We look at the implications this has for discourse processing, showing how the interpretation of the cleft's stative main verb as temporally overlapping an established reference time has effects on the integration of cleft content into the discourse model While this aspectual profile is common to all clefts, integration is further influenced by whether the cleft's presupposition contains material already known to the hearer (topic) or new (comment). While we cannot provide a complete model of discourse and temporal relations, we hope to show that the specific discourse relations taken to hold between incoming and existing information depend on a subtle interaction between a range of factors that influence the integration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]