Talk:Topic and comment

A unifying article on Information Structure

The best thing would be to unify the various articles on Information Structure (Topic-comment, Topic (linguistics), Focus (linguistics)) into a single one and then have various articles on individual theories (Vallduvi, [MAK Halliday]], Prague School, various theories in generative syntax). These theories have many things in common, but they also differ a lot.

That's an excellent one of several possible ways of organizing entries in this field of study. It seems that, at present, the talk page comment above is the only evidence of any knowledge of Information theory (linguistics) at Wikipedia. A great opportunity for someone to put an expensive education to use for the common good. ;) Harold Philby (talk) 02:40, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Meaning of theme

This site is redirected to from "theme (linguistics)" but in that respect, I find this entry unsatisfactory. It doesn't really account well for the usage of theme with respect to thematic relations and theta roles. As per Carnie, "Entities that undergo actions, are moved, experienced or perceived are called themes." This is an admittedly vague, but nonetheless a very prominent and altogether different use of the term "theme." The disambiguation for theme really needs to account for this. 68.100.79.249 11:20, 19 January 2007 (UTC) Edris Qarghah

That is a different use of theme. The use of "theme" discussed in the present article is the original use of the term in linguistics from Ammann 1928. I added a note.--Jirka6 14:53, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

see a presentation about this problem in Japanese

Is it correct to say that there is a problem with the Japanese language? It seems to me that some people might find that offensive.75.17.159.55 (talk) 12:14, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

This use of "problem" is in a technical context. It does not say there is any problem with the Japanese language; it only says, in fact, where to find a presentation — one which happens to be written in Japanese — which describes how postpositions are used in building the topic-comment construction. "Problem" here = "[description of] how postpositions are used in building the topic-comment construction". IfYouDoIfYouDon't (talk) 03:33, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

It's in a mess

Without proper referencing, many of the claims made in the article are inappropriate. In particular, Halliday's systemic functional grammar has an extensively worked-out system for locating the boundary between theme and rheme; this should be given more prominence, I think. It directly grew out of the Prague school, so has historical significance too. Tony (talk) 12:55, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Confusing

I can't make sense of this passage (quoted below). First I'm told the topic wouldn't be the subject in the passive voice but then I'm told the subject IS the topic in the passive sentence. What? Or is the explanation that the dog is the subject in a passive sentence. That's not how I understand the subject. The subject in a sentence for the second example is still the little girl even though it's passive and the dog is the primary actor. But what confuses me even more is that the example seems to make the point that a topic is always the first part of the sentence based on this conclusion. What about an example of a topic that is NOT the beginning of a sentence? What is the criteria of something being a topic? You can argue the sentence is about both a dog and a girl. Is the understanding that frequently, in English, we always lead off with what we are talking about or what is the point?

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

(1) The dog bit the little girl. (2) The little girl was bitten by the dog.

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

Johnhgagon (talk) 19:50, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

It's not ideal, no. But the last point is reasonable. English, like most languages (but not Japanese, for example) uses the start of the clause to tell the reader/listener what the clause is going to be about. "This is what I'm going to tell you about." There's a boundary between this opening, grammatically, and the rest. In systemic functional grammar, it's the theme–rheme boundary. This becomes important when we're looking at intonation in spoken mode (intonation often tracks that boundary); and it matters when we use a "marked" theme, as opposed to an unmarked one. In terms of helping us to write, being aware of thematic flow is important, particularly at the outset of a WP article where it's big-picture summary style. Thematic chaining strategy is critical in that context. Tony (talk) 02:01, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

The problem is that the person who initially wrote this misunderstands the grammatical term 'subject', which refers to the nominative case. In the passive voice, the person upon whom the action is being done/committed _becomes_ the subject.

The sentence could easily read: "The girl was bitten." and have it end there. The girl is the subject because every sentence requires a subject and because "The girl was bitten" is a complete sentence. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.178.173.150 (talk) 10:43, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree that in sentences (1) and (2) the italicized phrases are both subjects.

The section Topic–comment#Realization of topic–comment says "English: the topic/theme always comes first in the clause, and is typically marked out by intonation as well." Subject (grammar)#Three criteria for identifying subjects in English also says that this is where the subject normally is in English. So perhaps topic and subject always coincide in English.

This article needs examples where the topic is not the grammatical subject (if this is possible in English, I don't know — it's what I came here to find out). —Coroboy (talk) 20:43, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

I agree this is all confused, and the first example about the girl and the dog is just wrong. In English (in almost all cases) a subject is obligatory, and therefore to _omit_ a topic, a referentless pronoun is used for the required subject. For example: "It was Tuesday that I sang in the choir" has no sentence initial topic, because "it" does not refer to anything, and cannot make a topic. Probably (I'm absolutely not an expert here), the rheme/theme people would say that (Tuesday) is the rheme and (singing in the choir) is the theme. Indeed, in Japanese, one might well say 合唱で歌ったのは、火曜日だった (choirで-sangったのは、Tuesdayだった; topic first, ending in the famous -ha topic marker, separated by comma from rheme ending with the copula). In fact, even though Japanese has an explicit topic marker, the topic is almost always first. It has always seemed to me that mr chomsky is Wrong (but this must be impossible, since he is the world's most cited living intellectual, we're told); subject is not a fundamental category, it is a conflation of two concepts. The first is the syntactic association with 'agent' (the biter for an active verb) or 'victim' (the bitee for a passive verb) and the second is "non-rheme" marking, i.e. it's usually the topic, but if it isn't, it certainly isn't the rheme. This makes 'subject', certainly a universal of Indo-European grammar, very hard to identify clearly outside the IE-sphere. I have a large Japanese "Dictionary of Linguistics" published by Kenkyusha (1971): the headwords are all in English, there is no entry for "subject" (!), though there is 'subject-raising' etc, and hopes we might find out what the 'subject' mean in terms of Japanese grammar are dashed, because every example in the book is in English. This is one odd "universal". Imaginatorium (talk) 05:04, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

The unmarked form in English is usually for subject and theme (= topic) to coincide as first element in a clause—the point of departure, what the message will be about: "The duke has given my aunt that teapot". Compare with: "My aunt has been given that teapot by the duke", and "That teapot the duke has given my aunt". But it's more complicated in many instances: "Well but then Anne surely wouldn't the best idea be to join the group?" Tony (talk) 05:25, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Ok, seriously? Just say "after"

From the article:

In modern Hebrew, a topic may be adjoined to a sentence from the right-hand side, while the syntactic subject of the sentence is an expletive. (Note that "to the right" refers to the phrase's location in the standard linguistic representation of the sentence – left-to-right, Roman Alphabet – and is independent of the directionality of the given language's native script; hence the topic phrase is said to appear to the right, even though in Hebrew writing it is seen on the left.) For example, זה מאד מענין הספר הזה "ze meod meanyen ha-sefer ha-ze" (lit. "This is very interesting this book") means "This book is very interesting". The syntactic subject is "ze", which is meaningless, while the topic is "ha-sefer ha-ze" ("this book"), which appears to the right of (i.e. after the main clause of) the sentence, and not in its canonical subject position (which is occupied by the meaningless "ze").

73.169.164.153 (talk) 23:36, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

Hebrew example

In the example, זה מאד מענין הספר הזה , should the word order not be מענין מאד ? Clean Copy^talk 12:45, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Korean Subject Markers

"Japanese and Korean: the topic is normally marked with a postposition such as -wa (は) or 는/은, -(n)eun."

Aren't 는 and 은 subject markers, not topic markers? 138.25.4.93 (talk) 02:45, 6 November 2018 (UTC)