Topic and comment

This article is about the sentence-level category topic; for the discourse-level category see Discourse topic; topic is also commonly referred to as theme; for theme in generative grammar, see theta role; for theme in semantics, see Thematic relation.

In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. That the information structure of a clause is divided in this way is generally agreed on, but the boundary between topic/theme and comment/rheme/focus depends on grammatical theory.

The difference between "topic" and grammatical subject is that topic is used to describe the information structure, or pragmatic structure of a clause and how it coheres with other clauses, whereas the subject is a purely grammatical category. For example, it is possible to have clauses where the subject is not the topic, such as in passive voice. In some languages, word order and other syntactic phenomena are determined largely by the topic–comment (theme–rheme) structure. These languages are sometimes referred to as topic-prominent languages. Chinese and Japanese are often given as examples of this.

The distinction was probably first suggested by Henri Weil in 1844. Georg von der Gabelentz distinguished psychological subject (roughly topic) and psychological object (roughly focus). In the Prague school, the dichotomy, termed topic–focus articulation, has been studied mainly by Vilém Mathesius, Jan Firbas, František Daneš, Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová. They have been concerned mainly by its relation to intonation and word-order. The work of Michael Halliday in the 1960s is responsible for developing linguistic science through his systemic functional linguistics model for English (see e.g. Halliday 1967–68, 1970)

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

Definitions

The term "topic" can be defined in a number of different ways. Among the most common are

In an ordinary English clause, the subject is normally the same as the topic/theme (example 1), even in the passive voice (where the subject is a patient, not an agent: example 2):

These clauses have different topics: the first is about the dog, and the second about the little girl.

In English it is also possible to use other sentence structures to show the topic of the sentence, as in the following:

A distinction must be made between the clause-level topic and the discourse-level topic. Suppose we are talking about Mike's house:

In the example, the discourse-level topic is established in the first clause: it is Mike's house. In the following sentence, a new "local" topic is established on the clause level: he (Mike). But the discourse-level topic is still Mike's house, which is why the last comment does not seem out of place.

The case of expletives best exemplifies the subject–topic (subject–theme) distinction. Consider sentences with expletives (meaningless subjects), like:

In these 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 the extended projection principle, and is nevertheless necessary. In these sentences the topic is never the subject, but is determined pragmatically. In (6) the topic is the whole proposition expressed by the sentence (i.e., the fact that it is raining). In (7) it is "some room". In (8) it is arguably the equality in length of the day and night in some day (rather than the day itself).

Realization of topic–comment

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. Again, linguists disagree on many details.

Languages often show different kinds of grammar for sentences that introduce new topics and those that continue discussing previously established topics. When a sentence introduces a new topic for discussion, it is most likely to use one of the strategies mentioned in (b), or (c) above.

When a sentence continues discussing a previously established topic, it is likely to use pronouns to refer to the topic. Topics of this sort show a tendency to be subjects, as mentioned in (a) above. In many languages, pronouns referring to previously established topics will show pro-drop.

See also

References

  1. ↑ MAK Halliday (1994). An introduction to functional grammar, 2nd ed., Hodder Arnold: London, p. 37

Further reading

External links

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