Topic Shift in Casual Conversation

Abstract

The study of topic in discourse involves identifying the boundaries of stretches of discourse which set one fragment of discourse off from the rest. In other words, it is the study of where one part of a conversation ends and where another begins. There is undoubtedly an intuitive notion of topic as every speaker change does not necessarily terminate a particular coherent piece of conversation (Brown and Yule, 1983:69). I will analyse topic choice and shift using the techniques found in Discourse Analysis (Brown and Yule 1983). The data used to illustrate this analysis involves two friends engaged in a casual, social conversation.