In spontaneous discourse, speakers of standard Castilian Spanish regularly use ‘pragmatic mode’ rather than ‘grammatical mode’ (Givón, 1979) — i.e., they use less grammatically coded utterances — to signal topics/topic shifts. There is a difference in pragmatic function between the use of these overtly marked topics (cf. Barnes, 1985: 9) and thematic stagers such as utterance-initial adverbials/sentence adverbs whose information status and textual shift function are sometimes still undifferentiated from those of topics (Virtanen, 1992). Grammaticalised topics (Reinhart, 1982) are not discussed here, as topic-prominence is not the issue with these. A further discourse-orientation point concerning the Spanish language arises from data in radio and TV interviews/university transcripts of face-to-face interviews in standard Castilian which show that many topic forms are followed by predications of the ‘noanaphor’ type (Barnes, 1985: 10, 31), characterised by the absence of syntactic co-reference, though not of semantic coding, between topic and predication. Such patterning is regularly used in this language variety and may mean that a topic-prominent pragmatic speech mode exists in Castilian Spanish. Research is needed to ascertain how language-specific this phenomenon is.