The Role of Global Topics and Sentence Topics in the Construction of Passage Macrostructure.

摘要

Two experiments are reported on the nature of global coherence in technical passages. Subjects were asked to state the topic of presented passages in the form of a noun phrase that designated a single object. The first experiment shows that whether the passage is organized around a single major referent has a powerful effect on the difficulty of identifying the topic. The second experiment shows that which referent appears as the surface subject of individual passage sentences is also a powerful determinant of the perceived passage topic. The results are discussed in terms of the readers constructing a macrostructure for the passage, and selecting the central referent of the macrostructure for the statement of the topic. If the immediate propositional content or the surface structure of a passage does not allow a global topic to be selected, the reader must engage in time-consuming inferential processes to construct a suitable macrostructure for the passage. (Author)