Topic shift markers in parliamentary discourse: Analysis of President Zapatero's speech [2011]

The notion of topic has received much attention in linguistics and has been studied from different perspectives, although the concept has not always been applied to the analysis of texts. In this article, we analyze a political speech delivered at the Spanish Parliament and describe the strategies used by the speaker to signal topic shift, and in particular, topic introduction. In the analysis of the data we have identified vocatives, discourse markers, verbal markers of point of view, and meta-discursive expressions as markers of such strategy. These can appear alone or combined in a synergic or accumulative process whereby certain linguistic expressions orient the hearer on discourse structure and boundaries. The description and analysis of topic markers will allow us to better comprehend how sequential relations in discourse shape the topic structure of an expository-argumentative text.