Topic Development and Boundary Cues in Hakka Conversational Discourse

Topic Development and Boundary Cues in Hakka Conversational Discourse

The structure of conversational discourse is context-dependent, and the organization of discourse segments and preferences for signaling discourse boundaries are language-specific characteristics. Participating speakers, speaking scenarios, and communication purposes instantaneously affect the conduct of social interaction and verbal exchanges during a conversation. For example, topic maintenance is sustained by the overt exchange of coherent information, and lexical preferences at the boundaries of related discourse segmentation can help construct the course of topic development. Moreover, form-based discourse units are used to represent the content of spoken utterances and to describe the interaction of speakers in conversations. This study investigated topic-specific Hakka conversations using a top-down two-level discourse segmentation approach to examine the development and production of topics. Typical cues and expressions used to initiate topics and subtopics and their respective discourse functions in the Hakka conversations were analyzed. In the Hakka conversational data, noun phrases were preferred at the topic and subtopic transition boundaries, and complete forms such as clausal constructions were also favored, although the spontaneous speech was expected to be fragmentary in terms of syntactic structure.