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| Grammatical features |
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Syntax relationships |
Inlinguistics, thetopic, ortheme, of asentence is what is being talked about, and thecomment (rheme orfocus)[1] is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is calledinformation structure. It is generally agreed thatclauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases, the boundary between them depends on the specificgrammatical theory that is used to analyze the sentence.
The topic of a sentence is distinct from the grammaticalsubject. The topic is defined bypragmatic considerations, that is, thecontext that provides meaning. The grammatical subject is defined bysyntax. In any given sentence the topic and grammatical subject may be the same, but they need not be. For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog", but the topic is "the little girl".
The topic is what is being talked about and the subject is what is doing the action. They may be distinct concepts from the conceptagent (or actor), which is the "doer" and is defined bysemantics: the contextual meaning of the sentence in the paragraph. InEnglish clauses with averb in thepassive voice, for instance, the topic is typically the subject, and the agent may be omitted or follow the prepositionby. For example, in the sentence "The little girl was bitten by the dog", "the little girl" is both the subject and the topic, but "the dog" is the agent.
In some languages, word order and othersyntactic phenomena are determined largely by the topic–comment (theme–rheme) structure. Such languages are sometimes referred to astopic-prominent language. Korean and Japanese are often given as examples.
The sentence- or clause-level "topic", or "theme", can be defined in a number of different ways. Among the most common are
In an ordinaryEnglish clause, the subject is normally the same as the topic/theme (example 1) even in the passive voice, when the subject is a patient, not an agent such as in example 2:
Those clauses have different topics: the first is aboutthe dog, and the second is aboutthe little girl.
In English, it is possible to use other sentence structures to show the topic of the sentence such as these:
The case ofexpletives is sometimes rather complex. Consider sentences with expletives (meaningless subjects), like:
In those examples, the syntactic subject position (to the left of the verb) is manned by the meaningless expletive ("it" or "there"), whose sole purpose is satisfying theextended projection principle, and is nevertheless necessary. In those sentences, the topic is never the subject but is determinedpragmatically. In all these cases, the whole sentence refers to the comment part.[2]
The relation between topic (theme) and comment (rheme, focus) should not be confused with the topic–comment relation in theRhetorical Structure Theory DiscourseTreebank (RST-DT) corpus, where it is defined as "a general statement or topic of discussion is introduced, after which a specific remark is made on the statement or topic". For example: "[As far as the pound goes,] [some traders say a slide toward support at 1.5500 may be a favorable development for the dollar this week.]"[3][4]
Different languages 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. Topic fronting refers to placing the topic at the beginning of a clause, regardless of whether or not it is marked.[5] Again, linguists disagree on many details.
Languages often show different kinds of grammar between sentences that introduce new topics and those that continue discussing previously-established topics.
When a sentence continues discussing a previously-established topic, it is likely to use pronouns to refer to the topic. Such topics tend to be subjects. In many languages, pronouns referring to previously-established topics usepro-drop.
In English, the topic, or theme, comes first in the clause and is typically marked out byintonation as well.[6]
English is quite capable of using a topic-prominent formulation, instead of a subject-prominent formulation, when context makes it desirable for one reason or another. A typical pattern for doing so is opening with aclass of prepositions such asas for,as regards,regarding,concerning,respecting,on,re, and others.Pedagogically orexpositorily, that approach has value especially when speakers know that they need tolead the listener's attention from one topic to another in a deftly-efficient manner. They sometimes actively avoid misplacement of the focus of attention from moment to moment. However, topic-prominent languages might use that approach by default or obligately, but in subject-prominent ones such as English, it is merely an option, which often is not invoked.
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זה
ze
this
מענין
meʿanyen
interesting
מאד
meʾod,
very,
הספר
ha-sefer
book
הזה
ha-ze
this
זה מענין מאד הספר הזה
ze meʿanyen meʾod, ha-sefer ha-ze
this interesting very, book this
"This book is very interesting."
The main application of the topic-comment structure is in the domain of speech technology, especially the design of embodied conversational agents (intonational focus assignment, relation between information structure and posture and gesture).[7] There were some attempts to apply the theory of topic/comment for information retrieval[8] and automatic summarization.[9]
The distinction between subject and topic was probably first suggested byHenri Weil in 1844.[10] He established theconnection betweeninformation structure and word order.Georg von der Gabelentz distinguishedpsychological subject (roughly topic) andpsychological object (roughly focus). In thePrague school, the dichotomy, termedtopic–focus articulation, has been studied mainly byVilém Mathesius,[11]Jan Firbas,František Daneš,Petr Sgall andEva Hajičová. They have been concerned mainly by its relation to intonation and word-order. Mathesius also pointed out that the topic does not provide new information but connects the sentence to the context. The work ofMichael Halliday in the 1960s is responsible for developing linguistic science through hissystemic functional linguistics model for English.[12]
