Resumen de Topic and topicality in text: a contrastive study of English and Spanish narrative texts

Raquel Hidalgo Downing, Angela Downing Rothwell

• In this chapter, topic and topicality are explored through the application of a model of analysis to a bilingual sample of English and Spanish written narrative texts in equivalent genres. The results of the analysis show that aboutness topics and frame-setting topics are cross-linguistically stable categories, although language-specific differences are found in the syntactic coding, for instance in how Spanish marks topicless sentences.