Topics and Topicalization in Highly Affective Communicative Contexts in Lebanese Arabic: A closer look on Participant Relevance Topics and their role in discourse

The present study focuses on different topicalization strategies and on the linguistic realization of a variety of topics used in highly affective communicative contexts in Lebanese Arabic, i.e., contexts where speakers show highly emotional states. Through the analysis of topic occurrences found in this corpus, my study explores some discursive and pragmatic functions of topicalization and identifies and analyses “Participant Relevance Topics” —a specific type of free topics which appear with relative abundance in the data and fulfil important discursive and pragmatic functions.