Feeder Topic

Many researches on topics acknowledge topicless units of discourse. For example, the Centering theory allows a discourse-segment-initial utterance not to have a backward-looking center and the framework proposed by Kuppevelt(1995) identifies such a unit as a feeder. However, this paper primarily claims that there are no topicless units in discourse once we make distinctions for topics in a way that is fine-grained enough. Thus, this paper identifies a so-called feeder topic, a topic that is not yet established in the discourse but is a clear topic at least in the attentional state of the speaker. I further claim that the there-be construction in English can function as an operational characterization of the feeder topic. Identifying such a topic notion, as for the Centering theory, I suggest that there should be no utterances that have no backward-looking centers.