Subjects and topics in conversation

This paper presents an examination of the expression of subject and topic in conversation, using parameters established by Centering Theory. Based on a corpus analysis of English and Spanish casual conversations, we show (i) under what circumstances the subject and the topic of an utterance coincide (‘topic’ is defined, according to Centering, as the backward-looking center of an utterance); and (ii) what referring expressions are used to encode subject and topic. We found that the Cb is realized as subject most of the time (80% of the utterances in English and 73% in Spanish), showing that topichood and subjecthood tend to be assigned to the same entity. The preferred realization for the Cb in those cases is a pronoun in English and a zero pronoun in Spanish.