Mantenimiento y cambio de tópico en un corpus de ELE

Abstract

The present investigation studies clean topic-continuity and topic-shift in a corpus of oral narratives produced by Dutch-speaking learners of Spanish as a foreign language. It thereby investigates to what extent the learners use the null pronoun, the explicit personal pronoun and the proper name in order to mark both topic-continuity and topic-shift, considering the different referential options in Dutch and Spanish, respectively non-pro-drop and pro-drop languages. Embedded in the cognitive linguistics tradition, the study is primarily based upon the Accessibility Theory (Ariel 1990) and the accessibility scales created by Ariel and Figueras Solanilla (2002). The corpus data were annotated in Excel and in the UAM CorpusTool.