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In linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
, the topic (or theme) is informally what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic
Topic (linguistics)

In linguistics, the topic is the part of the proposition of a Predicate Sentence . Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. it has already been mentioned and understood....
. Although this general nature of topic-comment dichotomy is generally accepted, anything beyond that is a matter of great controversy.

The distinction was probably first suggested by Henri Weil
Henri Weil

Henri Weil was a Germany-born France Jewish philologist.He was educated at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Leipzig. He went to France, and continued his studies at Paris, graduating as "docteur ?s lettres" in 1845, and becoming "agr?g?" in 1848....
 in 1844. Georg von der Gabelentz distinguished psychological subject (roughly topic) and psychological object (roughly focus).






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In linguistics
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
, the topic (or theme) is informally what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic
Topic (linguistics)

In linguistics, the topic is the part of the proposition of a Predicate Sentence . Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. it has already been mentioned and understood....
. Although this general nature of topic-comment dichotomy is generally accepted, anything beyond that is a matter of great controversy.

The distinction was probably first suggested by Henri Weil
Henri Weil

Henri Weil was a Germany-born France Jewish philologist.He was educated at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Leipzig. He went to France, and continued his studies at Paris, graduating as "docteur ?s lettres" in 1845, and becoming "agr?g?" in 1848....
 in 1844. Georg von der Gabelentz distinguished psychological subject (roughly topic) and psychological object (roughly focus). In the Prague school, the dichotomy has been studied mainly by Vilém Mathesius
Vilém Mathesius

Vil?m Mathesius was a Czech people linguist and literary historian, a scholar of English literature and Czech literature. His brother was Bohumil Mathesius....
, Jan Firbas
Jan Firbas

Jan Firbas , was a Czechs linguistics, a prominent proponent of the Prague School of linguistics. He developed a theory of topic-comment, called Functional Sentence Perspective....
, František Daneš, Petr Sgall
Petr Sgall

Petr Sgall is a Czech linguist. He specializes in Dependency grammar, Topic-focus articulation and Common Czech....
 and Eva Hajicová
Eva Hajicová

Eva Hajicov? is a Czechs linguistics, specializing in topic-focus articulation and corpus linguistics....
. They were concerned mainly by its relation to intonation and word-order. The work of Michael Halliday
Michael Halliday

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is an Australian linguistics who developed an internationally influential grammar model, the systemic functional grammar ....
 in the 1960s is probably responsible for bringing the ideas to Functional Grammar
Functional grammar

A range of grammatical function-based approaches to the scientific study of language have been termed "functional". The grammar model developed by Simon C....
.

Note that in some categorizations, topic refers only to the contrastive theme and comment to the noncontrastive theme + rheme.

Realization of topic/comment


Different language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
s mark topics in different ways. Distinct intonation and word-order are the most common means. The tendency to place topicalized constituents sentence-initially (topic fronting) is widespread. Again, linguists disagree on many details.

  • English
    English language

    English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
    : intonation is the primary means, although word order (e.g., fronting of contrasted topics: Kim, I like.) and other syntactic (passivisation, clefting
    Clefting

    A cleft sentence is a sentence formed by a main clause and a subordinate clause, which together express a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence....
    ) or lexical means ("As for...", "Regarding...") are also employed.


  • Japanese
    Japanese language

    IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
    : topic is marked with a special clitic
    Clitic

    In linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonology dependent word. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level....
     postposition (?, ha); see a presentation about this problem in Japanese .


  • So called free-word order languages (e.g. Russian
    Russian language

    Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
    , Czech
    Czech language

    Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czech people worldwide....
    , to a certain extent Chinese
    Chinese language

    Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
     or German
    German language

    German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
    ) use word-order as the primary means. Usually topic precedes focus. However, for example in Czech, both orders are possible. The order with comment sentence-initial is referred as subjective (V. Mathesius' term, as opposed to objective) and expresses certain emotional involvement. The two orders are distinguished by intonation.


See also

  • Topic (linguistics)
    Topic (linguistics)

    In linguistics, the topic is the part of the proposition of a Predicate Sentence . Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. it has already been mentioned and understood....
  • Topic-prominent language
    Topic-prominent language

    A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax so that Sentence s have a topic-comment structure, in which the topic is the thing being talked about and the comment is what is said about the topic....
  • Focus (linguistics)
    Focus (linguistics)

    Focus is a concept in linguistics theory that deals with how information in one phrase relates to information that has come before. Focus has been analyzed in a variety of ways by linguist....
  • Thematic equative
    Thematic equative

    In English, a thematic equative is a thematic resource in which two or more separate elements in a clause are grouped together to form a single constituent of the topic-comment structure....