Topic-comment structures in information dialogues
M.M.M. Rats · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · 1994
This paper shows that the topic-comment distribution in natural language utterances and the use of the syntactic structures left-dislocation, topic topicalization and right-dislocation contribute to directing, maintaining, shifting and redirecting the attentional focus in dialogues.The arguments are based on an empirical study of a corpus of 111 spoken information seeking dialogues.