how can we discourse about one topic like forget the world
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Discourse topicNICHOLAS ASHER1. IntroductionDiscourse Topic is a familiar but also elusive concept. Any competentspeaker or writer knows that a coherent discourse has bits that have acommon theme and these common themes typically link together to ex-pand upon a larger theme. This is how we learn to write paragraphs (thelead sentence), essays, chapters and even books.Researchers like van Kuppevelt (1995) have thought that discoursetopics must be an intrinsic feature of the logical form of a coherent dis-course; they are organizing principles of discourse interpretation. SDRT,the formal theory of discourse interpretation that I have worked on, has amuch more limited view of discourse topic; discourse topic plays an im-portant role in connection with certain disco urse relations like Narration.Other discourse relations, in particular those that exploit the logical orsemantic structure of the discourse constituents they relate like Paralleland Contrast (Asher 1993, Asher and Lascarides 2003), have somethingsimilar to a topic as an intrinsic part of their semantics; Parallel holdsbetween two constituents only if there is a common theme of those con-stituents; Contrast holds only if there are contrasting themes. Themesare relatively straightforward to define (though the details are somewhatmessy – see Asher (1993), or Asher, Hardt and Busquets (1997) for a con-siderably improved account. Themes are unlike discourse topics for Nar-ration, however, in tha t they must reflect as fully as possible the commonlogical structure of the two Parallel or Contrasting constituents. Fur-ther, while they are an essentia l part of the semantics of these relations,they are not themselves needed as constituents in logical form. Discoursetopics for Narration in SDRT, on the other hand, should summarize and