Study Of Discursive Topicality In English Editorials

Topic is a familiar word to everybody, but its linguistic concept is rather controversial. The study of topic as a linguistic concept started from the middle of the 19th century, made some progress in the first half of the 20th century, was theorized in the middle of the 1970s, and has been flourishing ever since. Many scholars have studied topic from different perspectives. But up to now, there is no consensus on its definition. The most accepted method is to divide topic studies into sentential study and discursive study. Sentential study treats topic as the grammatical element within the scope of a sentence, while discursive study is concerned with the identification of topic of a discourse in terms of how the topic contributes to the organization or coherence of a text. These studies are of great significance in linguistics, but they are mainly concerned with the function, the development or the position change of topic in sentence or discourse, yet the study of topic as a kind of attribute is still inadequate.Based on the previous study, this thesis is not to explore how the topic develops in the discourse, but to explore the attribute of topicality from three different perspectives:information theory, pragmatics and semantics. The theories used in this thesis are the information expansion theory, appraisal theory and lexical repetition theory. The methodology adopted in this thesis is qualitative and quantitative analysis, mainly through textual analysis as language evidences. These texts are 12 editorials collected from the Guardians, New York Times and China Daily. The significance of the study is to throw some light on the discursive topic and editorial study by exploring the topicality in English editorials and provide some implication for the English reading and writing.