DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2019.1458
title: An experimental study of the topicality and use of references

description: The purpose of this linguistic research is to investigate how Thai learners ofEnglish understand the topicality and use of references in one sentence along with testing their reading and writing proficiency in English. There is a variety of semantic and pragmatic factors which are coherently associated with the effect of topicality. This effect of topicality influences the use of reference by Thai learners of English. These factors are topicality, center of attention, topical subjecthood with prepositional dative, cognitive conception with discourse marker, information structure, grammatical role,and coherence relations with discourse markers. Many proponents argue and describe these contextual factors relevant to topicality in different theories or notions to the implicit causality contexts in the differently cognitive linguistics. The present study shows the experimental findings as in accordance with three categories of results in which the majority of participants understand the topicality and use of references. First, “results from the grammatical components” is relevant to the first research question, “What is salient entity in the discourse usually topicalized by Thai learners of English?”. The first result suggests that the majority of Thai learners of English topicalized the subject in an initiated sentence and pronominalized it the following sentence. Topicalization of grammatical components was carried out with the grammatical subject as the most salient entity in the discourse. Second, “results from the different factors” is also relevant to the first research question. The second result suggests that the majority of Thai learners of English again topicalized the subject in an initiated sentence and pronominalized it in the following sentence. Topicalization of thedifferent factors was carried out with the subject position, the most salient entity in the discourse, and the prepositional dative or discourse marker. Third, “regarding the influence of proficiency levels” relates to the second research question, “How does proficiency level of English affect topicalization by Thai learners of English?”. The third result suggests that the majority of Thai learners of English topicalized the other component which has a more salient entity in the discourse than a subject position does, and pronominalized it in the following sentence. Topicalization as a result of the influence of proficiency levels was carried with ‘a subject in the subordinate clause’ or ‘an object’ or ‘noun phrase’ which has a more salient entity in the discourse than a subject position does. Not only is this linguistic research probably useful to prove theories and contribute to developing knowledge of how topicality influences the use of references in term of semantics and pragmatics, but it also might encourage Thai learners of English to explore more factors involving topicalization which account for the topicality’s effect on the use of references. Furthermore, the experimental implementation of this current study could be a pioneer study for future study of the quantitative research relevant to the present study in order to refer the generalizability in quantitative research to the extent to which we can generalize the findings from a sample (this present study represents a pioneer study) to an entire population of the quantitative research.