Lautamatti (1987): Topical structure analysis

Representing the line of research on information structuring, Lautamatti (1987) studies topical structure in discourse. Her framework, the Topical Structure Analysis model, directly or indirectly builds up the discourse topic, that is, the main idea discussed in the text. Lautamatti examines the role of the subjects of successive sentences in topical development, the very elements which define

“what the sentence is about” (1987, p.88). She deals only with the so called

“mood subjects”, which are structurally in the position of the subject, and distinguishes two different types within this category, namely the “structural dummies” (e.g., there in an existential clause) and the “lexical” or “notional”

subjects (p.89). Lexical subjects are also of two types, the ones which relate

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directly to discourse topic, called “topical subjects”, and the ones which do not, called “non-topical subjects” (p.89).

As mentioned earlier, the discourse topic is basically the main idea discussed.

Lautamatti (1987) also talks about subordinate ideas, “sub-topics” (p.88), which also contribute to the discourse topic. In her definition, topical development is

“the way the written sentences in discourse relate to the discourse topic and its sub-topics” (p.87). The various sentences form sequences when developing the discourse topic. Lautamatti distinguishes three general types of organization or, as she calls them, topical progression. The first type is parallel progression, where the topic/sub-topic in a number of successive sentences is the same. The second type is sequential progression, in which the predicate, or the rhematic part of one sentence provides the topic for the next. And finally, the third type of topic progression is extended parallel progression, where the writer returns to a topic/sub-topic mentioned earlier in the text (p.88).

A sample analysis is presented in Example 1 to illustrate Lautamatti’s method of analysis. The sentences in the text are numbered for ease of reference. First, the topical subjects are located in the text (indicated in italics), and then the sequence of topical subjects is charted (Chart 1): parallel topic progressions are placed in the same column below each other, and sequential progressions are always placed in a new column to the right.

Applying this analytical framework, Lautamatti (1987) examines topical development in written discourse, more precisely in an authentic text and its simplified versions. Her principal aim is to find out whether simplifica-tion is accompanied by changes in the pattern of topical development. The results of her analyses show that simplified texts do vary to some extent in their reproduction of the original pattern of topical structure. In the material examined in the analysis, two distinct types of simplification strategy occur, one resulting in a kind of “simple” text (as the one described in the quote from Lautamatti, 1987), and the other resulting in an extreme simplification of topical structures.

Example (1):

1 When a human infant is born into any community in any part of the world, it has two things in common with any other infant, provided neither of them has been damaged in any way either before or during birth. 2 Firstly, and most obviously, new born children are completely helpless. 3 Apart from a powerful capacity to draw attention to their helplessness by using sound, there is nothing the new born child can do to ensure his own survival. 4 Without care from some other human being or beings, be it mother, grandmother, sister, nurse, or human group, a child is very

86 Krisztina Károly

unlikely to survive. 5 This helplessness of human infants is in marked contrast with the capacity of many new born animals to get to their feet within minutes of birth and run with the herd within a few hours. 6 Although young animals are certainly at risk, sometimes for weeks or even months after birth, compared with the human infant they very quickly develop the capacity to fend for themselves. 7 It would seem that this long period of vulnerability is the price that the human species has to pay for the very long period which fits man for survival as species. 8 It is during this very long period in which the human infant is totally dependent on others that it reveals the second feature which it shares with all other undamaged human infants, a capacity to learn a language. 9 For this reason, biologists now suggest that language is ‘species specific’ to the human race, that is to say, they consider the human infant to be genetically programmed in such a way that it can acquire language. 10 This suggestion implies that just as human beings are designed to see three-dimensionally and in colour, and just as they are designed to stand upright rather than to move on all fours, so they are designed to learn and use language as part of their normal development as well-formed human beings. (Lautamatti, 1987, p.92)

sen-

tence Topic 1 Topic 2 Topic 3 Topic 5 Topic 6

1 a human infant 2 newborn children

3 a child

4 the new born child

5 this helplessness

6 young animals

7 this long period of

vulnerability 8 the human infant

9 language

10 human beings

Chart 1: Sequence of topical subjects in the text

Another outcome of the investigation is that in addition to the generally ac-cepted features affecting readability such as sentence length, syntactic complex-ity, and type of vocabulary, some types of topical development in discourse are intuitively felt to affect the readability of a text. Lautamatti (1987) summarizes this claim as follows:

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In the light of the findings of this paper, a “simple” text would represent the following picture of topical development: it would mostly use sentences in which the topical subject is the mood subject of the main clause; or, when the main clause serves as a modality marker, or has, say, a metalinguistic function, the topical subject would be the mood subject of a sub-clause immediately following the main clause. The number of sentences with a non-topical ISE would be relatively small. Sentences would follow each other by means of parallel progression much more frequently than by sequential progression, with few cases of extended progression or with other features atypical of the “pure” types. Extended progression might be supported by the use of cohesive discourse adjuncts. (p.108)