Anaphoric encapsulation, text information structure and discourse topicality

Resumen

The contribution of anaphoric encapsulators to the information structure of the utterance has often been restricted to observations regarding their position as sentence topics (theme) or as part of the comment (rheme). However, they may appear in other positions that can be better delimited with the help of a model of discourse segmentation such as the Basel Model. I explore the different discourse functions of anaphoric encapsulators in the three main units delineated in this model: the Nucleus or propositional core of the utterance, the Frame or the information chunk preceding the Nucleus, and the Appendix or slot for background information. Besides, I claim that the possibility for an anaphoric encapsulator to express the discourse topic of (part of) a text is intimately related to its position in the Utterance and propose a tentative scale of access to discourse topicality for this type of anaphors.