# Topics and comments



## rur1920

Hello all. I had a short discussion with another WRF user on whether the terms 'topic' and 'comment' must be meaningful. If anyone has any comments, I am thankful. So, the questions are:
1. Are the concepts of 'comment' and 'topic' meaningful? Is their meaning based on some well-defined procedure or reasoning?
2. If they are, what meaning do they have? What reasoning does one follow to establish what is a comment in a sentence? (I guess the question what is a topic is subsidiary).
Again, thank you. I think this forum deserves such clarifications, but I searched it for "topic comment" and found no designated thread.


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

Hi 

This answer comes a little late -but I hope you appreciate it nonetheless.
Yes - _topic_ and _comment_ are meaningful indeed. They are the basic elements of Information Structure, a subfield of Linguistics that deals with how information is structured and conveyed in human language.
Praha functionalists used _theme_ instead of _topic_, and and _rheme_ instead of _comment_. However, the most common terms nowadays are _topic_ and _focus_.
By _topic_ (or _theme_) we generally mean a piece of information in speech that is already shared between those who are participating in the communication, that's to say, old information. By focus (or _rheme_ or _comment_) we refer to new, not shared information. 
So, if I say "I saw the girl that moved in yesterday", we can say that _I saw_ is the comment (focus/rheme), the new information I'm introducing in the conversation, adding new information about the topic _the girl that moved in yesterday_ that's information already shared by you and I, hence old information.
If you want to know more you can read _Basic Notions of Information Structure_ by Manfred Krifka, I think it is well written and fairly understandable by non-linguists as well.


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## Cenzontle

Wikipedia has an article "Topic-comment".  I can't guarantee that it's easy to understand.
Some people (including me) think a sentence is easier to understand when familiar (= old) information is mentioned first, and new information is mentioned last.
I think the advantage of putting topic before comment (old before new) makes a good justification for using the passive voice in English.
Suppose I'm telling someone about a book, what it's about, how many pages, etc., and eventually I want to tell them who the author is.
I could use the active voice and say
"John Smith wrote the book."  
(For a brief moment, the listener hears "John Smith" and wonders "Why are you mentioning this unfamiliar name?"  
And then, a moment later, "Oh, I see, he wrote the book that we are talking about.")
Or you could use the passive voice and say
"The book was written by John Smith."
The listener hears "The book" and immediately understands what book you are talking about; 
now the listener is prepared to receive some new information about the familiar book:  the name of the author.


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

Cenzontle said:


> Wikipedia has an article.  I can't guarantee that it's easy to understand.
> Some people (including me) think a sentence is easier to understand when familiar (= old) information is mentioned first, and new information is mentioned last.
> I think the advantage of putting topic before comment (old before new) makes a good justification for using the passive voice in English.
> Suppose I'm telling someone about a book, what it's about, how many pages, etc., and eventually I want to tell them who the author is.
> I could use the active voice and say
> "John Smith wrote the book."
> (For a brief moment, the listener hears "John Smith" and wonders "Why are you mentioning this unfamiliar name?"
> And then, a moment later, "Oh, I see, he wrote the book that we are talking about.")
> Or you could use the passive voice and say
> "The book was written by John Smith."
> The listener hears "The book" and immediately understands what book you are talking about;
> now the listener is prepared to receive some new information about the familiar book:  the name of the author.


Yes, but then again, Topic doesn't come first in all languages, and even in languages where it usually comes first there are structures where it can come after the focus, ie italian's sentences with dislocation to the left periphery of the sentence:
A: "Allora, la festa?" ("so (are you coming to) the party?")
B: "*Io non ci vado* alla festa" ("I'm not going to the party", more similar to French's "moi, je ne viens pas à la fête")
 Clearly, B puts the focus (*Io non ci vado*)before the topic. It's called contrastive focus.
It can be in a different position than expected because your brain has different means to decipher it (i.e. prosody, syntactic structure, agreement, etc.)


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## rur1920

Deixis_am_Phantasma said:


> By _topic_ (or _theme_) we generally mean a piece of information in speech that is already shared between those who are participating in the communication, that's to say, old information. By focus (or _rheme_ or _comment_) we refer to new, not shared information.
> So, if I say "I saw the girl that moved in yesterday", we can say that _I saw_ is the comment (focus/rheme), the new information I'm introducing in the conversation, adding new information about the topic _the girl that moved in yesterday_ that's information already shared by you and I, hence old information.


The word that is boggling me the most is _information_; what represents information and what does not, what is information; what does it mean to know something (for example, I may know some fact, but not yet know that you find it suitable to mention it). Anyway, your definition seems to restrict applicability of the notions of _topic_ and _comment_ to situations of conversation among two definite persons. And even in such case, what if our notions of what we knew do not coincide? Say, what if I think that you know the girl whom I saw, but you don't know that the same girl moved in yesterday, yet in fact you don't know either the girl who moved in or the girl whom I saw. So, such definition of _topic_ comes to depend not on the language, but on the participants of the conversation. Then the question is, which participant do we keep in mind. If it is the one I am talking to, then the topic is null, and the comment is the entire sentence; not very helpful.

Thank you very much for your response.


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## rur1920

rur1920 said:


> Anyway, your definition seems to restrict applicability of the notions of _topic_ and _comment_ to situations of conversation among two definite persons.


Another example. Two conversations:
"What happened to the king?" - "The king is murdered". (Both know that something happened to the king, otherwise the question is non-sensical).
"Why do so many policemen search the city? There was a crime?" - "The king is murdered".


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

rur1920 said:


> The word that is boggling me the most is _information_; what represents information and what does not, what is information; what does it mean to know something (for example, I may know some fact, but not yet know that you find it suitable to mention it). Anyway, your definition seems to restrict applicability of the notions of _topic_ and _comment_ to situations of conversation among two definite persons. And even in such case, what if our notions of what we knew do not coincide? Say, what if I think that you know the girl whom I saw, but you don't know that the same girl moved in yesterday, yet in fact you don't know either the girl who moved in or the girl whom I saw. So, such definition of _topic_ comes to depend not on the language, but on the participants of the conversation. Then the question is, which participant do we keep in mind. If it is the one I am talking to, then the topic is null, and the comment is the entire sentence; not very helpful.
> 
> Thank you very much for your response.



The topic *needs* to be shared or to have been introduced in the communication not so long before it has been uttered. If it's not shared, then it's not old information, but new information, it is hence a focus.
So, this topic needs to be present in an information 'archive' that you and I *must* share. Let's say *I) *you and I both know there's a new inmate upstairs; *II)* you and I both know it's a girl; *III)* you and I both know she moved in yesterday, _*but*_ you didn't know that I saw her, so I'm adding new piece of information (_focus_), I'm commenting (hence also _comment_) on an old information that you and I shared. Remember that language is a social tool, and that there can't be any kind of communication without sharing information.
Linguists call this archive _Common Ground_ (here, here, and here). 
All participants in the communication must have this information in their _Common Ground _before an information can be promoted to the role of topic. Also remember that different people share different _Common Ground_, so mine and yours contain different information with respect to the one that say, you and your mother, you and 5 of your friends, or you and your supervisor at school share.
The topic of the conversation you and I are having in this moment is the term topic, and by adding new information (focus) I am also adding information to the _Common Ground _that you and I share. Once a focus becomes shared, it becomes topic.


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

rur1920 said:


> Another example. Two conversations:
> "What happened to the king?" - "The king is murdered". (Both know that something happened to the king, otherwise the question is non-sensical).
> "Why do so many policemen search the city? There was a crime?" - "The king is murdered".


Exactly. In the first example, _the king_ is the topic and _is murdered_ the focus. In the second one, the whole sentence is a focus, because it carries a whole new piece of information


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## rur1920

Thank you for your answer, I'll need time to think of it. 


Deixis_am_Phantasma said:


> Exactly. In the first example, _the king_ is the topic and _is murdered_ the focus. In the second one, the whole sentence is a focus, because it carries a whole new piece of information


Thank you. But then another question. I may also colour it in a different way: ""Why do so many policemen search the city? There was a crime?" - "The king is murdered". From the kind of police that is searching the city you may either guess or not guess that someone was murdered. ("The king himself?!! What, a revolution?"). Am I right that the colouring depends on our guesses about those imprecise guesses that people might make and don't even know themselves whether they make them?…


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

Yes, you're correct. In fact, the best way to understand whether we really have a topic (or a focus) or not is to check intonation and prosody. We retrieve information also on the phonology and phonetics of a piece of information.
Prosodically, foci have a high contour: if you look at the image, _I caught_ is a focus and has a high contour. 
Topics have a low contour, it seems it doesn't need to be  pitched, since your brain already contains this information, and high contours seems to play the role of recalling the listener's ear on the presence of new information.
If you look at the image, you'll see that _I really don't think _is the focus, and its contour is high, while the rest of the sentence contains a topic, and it has a low contour.
This to say that just reading a sentence won't help in most cases, you have to read the whole  conversation, consider the context, and look for intonation, too!


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## rur1920

Thank you for your new comment.
One problem is, in the case I mentioned, all is given for that resolution that I do, and the sentence has been heard (so intonation is given as well), yet since I cannot look into the minds of the participants of the conversation and read them, I cannot know whether the first participant (to whom the second phrase is addressed) guessed, that there was a murder, or not, and whether the second particpant guessed that the first participant guessed it. In fact, even being the first participant, I probably cannot know whether I did (so often I don't know what I know and what I don't).


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## Hulalessar

Cenzontle said:


> Wikipedia has an article "Topic-comment".  I can't guarantee that it's easy to understand.
> Some people (including me) think a sentence is easier to understand when familiar (= old) information is mentioned first, and new information is mentioned last.
> I think the advantage of putting topic before comment (old before new) makes a good justification for using the passive voice in English.
> Suppose I'm telling someone about a book, what it's about, how many pages, etc., and eventually I want to tell them who the author is.
> I could use the active voice and say
> "John Smith wrote the book."
> (For a brief moment, the listener hears "John Smith" and wonders "Why are you mentioning this unfamiliar name?"
> And then, a moment later, "Oh, I see, he wrote the book that we are talking about.")
> Or you could use the passive voice and say
> "The book was written by John Smith."
> The listener hears "The book" and immediately understands what book you are talking about;
> now the listener is prepared to receive some new information about the familiar book:  the name of the author.



Interesting observations, but I am inclined to think that we process language in chunks. Whilst all utterances necessarily pass through time, that is not quite how we experience them. In everyday discourse we do not feel we are constantly being kept in suspense.


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## ger4

On this website I found an interesting explanation of how Polish word order tends to follow a sequence from the 'background' to the 'topic' and from the 'topic' to the 'comment'. The final part of the 'comment' is called the 'focus' here. The following sentence is used as an example:   

'Storks fly south to Africa for the winter' - _Na zimę bociany odlatują na południa do Afryki_
- background - _na zimę_ - 'for the winter'
- topic - _bociany_ - 'storks'  
- comment - _odlatują na południa do Afryki_ - 'fly south to Africa' 
- focus of the comment - _do Afryki_ - 'to Africa'    

The sentence could be answering a question like 'given the fact that it is winter, and the storks fly south then, where exactly do they go?'

The description sounds very logical to me but I wonder if there are different opinions... Another point: it strikes me that a noun in 'background' or 'topic' position in a Polish sentence often corresponds to a definite noun in English. Even though Polish doesn't use definite articles, it is often (not always) quite obvious whether to add a definite or an indefinite article in the translation into English or German, just looking at the 'functional' position of a noun within the sentence. Wouldn't this mean that (in general) there is a link between 'definiteness' and 'topicalization'? Just guessing now... I've noticed something similar in Estonian. The 'topic' tends to be mentioned first, the 'comment' follows. An English indefinite noun is normally moved towards the end of the sentence ('comment' position) in the Estonian translation:

'An apple tree is blooming in the yard' - _Ôues õitseb õunapuu_ 
- topic - _õues_ - 'yard_inside' 
- comment - _õitseb õunapuu_ - 'blooms apple_tree' 

'A fire is burning in the tower' (i.e. lighthouse) - _Tornis põleb tuli_
- topic - _tornis_ - 'tower_in'
- comment - _põleb tuli_ - 'burns fire' 

'There's some food on the table' - _Laual on toitu_
- topic: _laual_ - 'table_on'
- comment: _on toitu_ - 'is food_some' (partitive) 


but: 'The food is on the table' - _Toit on laual_
- topic - _toit_ - 'food' 
- comment - _on laual_ - 'is table_on'


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## rur1920

Deixis_am_Phantasma said:


> Linguists call this archive _Common Ground_ (here, here, and here).


Thank you very much for your links. Please let me state my understanding of them, along with a comment of mine.

If I understand the links correctly, the terms 'topic' and 'comment' are  indeed meaningful as they derive their meaning from [a family of]  related theories, concerned with truth handling by a human. Pursuers of  these theories posit existence of an independent belief structure,  comprised of a number of "statements" with logical values of truth  assigned, and they imply that it is possible to study laws of how using  language in a conversation influences this imaginary structure, in other  words they imply that such laws exist. They also think that such belief  structures, loaded with truth statements, really may come close to  represent the state of the mind's knowledge. Also they take it as an  assumption that updating each other's “knowledge” taken as a set of  truth statements is a definitive function of a language. Since these  assumptions do not at all look plausible to me, from the point of view  of mere curiosity I am uninterested in those consequences that follow  from these assumptions. From the point of view of practical use, since  pondering about ways of updating the belief structures of various kinds  and about establishing correspondence of actions on these belief  structures into fragments of actual language statements is an  after-the-fact activity for linguists, little related to the fact of  conversation itself, and since a lot of language uses are not connected  to conversation (for example, in reading factual books the reader's  dynamics of getting to know the facts better are much less connected  with organisation of language in a book than in the case of  conversation), I think that referring to these structures is meaningless  if the goal is either to learn or to explain how to use a foreign  language. As a tenacious learner, I would not want to “convey  information” in a nice theoretical way, but to sound natural while  saying what I want, while achieving those effects of acting upon people  that I want, and getting understood by myself and by other people.

R.U.R. 



Holger2014 said:


> The sentence could be answering a question like 'given the fact that it is winter, and the storks fly south then, where exactly do they go?'


Does this question refer to presumptions about knowledge of the parties, or to the mind's inner mechanics of reasoning about things and remembering them? Since similar sentences in Russian would work the same way whether I intend anyone to hear them or not, I would say it is the latter!


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

rur1920 said:


> Thank you very much for your links. Please let me state my understanding of them, along with a comment of mine.
> 
> If I understand the links correctly, the terms 'topic' and 'comment' are  indeed meaningful as they derive their meaning from [a family of]  related theories, concerned with truth handling by a human. Pursuers of  these theories posit existence of an independent belief structure,  comprised of a number of "statements" with logical values of truth  assigned, and they imply that it is possible to study laws of how using  language in a conversation influences this imaginary structure, in other  words they imply that such laws exist. They also think that such belief  structures, loaded with truth statements, really may come close to  represent the state of the mind's knowledge. Also they take it as an  assumption that updating each other's “knowledge” taken as a set of  truth statements is a definitive function of a language. Since these  assumptions do not at all look plausible to me, from the point of view  of mere curiosity I am uninterested in those consequences that follow  from these assumptions. From the point of view of practical use, since  pondering about ways of updating the belief structures of various kinds  and about establishing correspondence of actions on these belief  structures into fragments of actual language statements is an  after-the-fact activity for linguists, little related to the fact of  conversation itself, and since a lot of language uses are not connected  to conversation (for example, in reading factual books the reader's  dynamics of getting to know the facts better are much less connected  with organisation of language in a book than in the case of  conversation), I think that referring to these structures is meaningless  if the goal is either to learn or to explain how to use a foreign  language. As a tenacious learner, I would not want to “convey  information” in a nice theoretical way, but to sound natural while  saying what I want, while achieving those effects of acting upon people  that I want, and getting understood by myself and by other people.
> 
> R.U.R.
> 
> 
> Does this question refer to presumptions about knowledge of the parties, or to the mind's inner mechanics of reasoning about things and remembering them? Since similar sentences in Russian would work the same way whether I intend anyone to hear them or not, I would say it is the latter!



I think you (wrongly) underestimated years of linguistic work... The fact that I have brought examples in short sentences to you just means that I've done so to make it clearer. Linguists actually work on spoken corpora, which are corpora made up of recordings of conversations, hence actual speech, actual communication, actual conversations. Stating that you don't think that language is organized in chunks means that you've been ignoring scientific discoveries on how the human brain works that have been done in the last years.
Also stating that knowing these structure won't help you learn a language is utterly wrong, since they are also used in didactics. 
I've started as a polyglot before turning into a linguist myself, and I can assure you that knowing about information structure helped me understand a lot of things on the languages I was learning, and I can assure that no grammar book can do that.
Having said this: what was the point of asking if you thought that it was all meaningless? What's your scientific evidence to prove that such theories are wrong? I'd like to hear a couple...


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## rur1920

There is some mis-understanding…


Deixis_am_Phantasma said:


> Stating that you don't think that language is organized in chunks means that you've been ignoring scientific discoveries on how the human brain works that have been done in the last years.


I did not say I did not think that 'language was organised in chunks'.


> Also stating that knowing these structure won't help you learn a language is utterly wrong, since they are also used in didactics.


Well, that may depend on a didactic or possibly on a language to learn… What I know is that such truth-relying concepts may not help me understand Tolstoi, for example, or understand why in colloquial speech I use some expression that is meaningless from the point of view of conveying truth… Because, if I take a random sentence ("It is possible to slaughter, steal, and despite that be happy" in talking about Nikolai Rostov), what knowledge do I learn from it? I do learn some knowledge, but not in a form of statements, that I learn are true; rather, knowledge that I gain is in the form of changed approaches to thinking about many things, the character included. What do I rely on while gaining knowledge from it? Nothing that I can meaningfully label as true or false.


> Having said this: what was the point of asking if you thought that it was all meaningless? What's your scientific evidence to prove that such theories are wrong? I'd like to hear a couple...


Well, I actually received an answer that I did not know. I really did not know that there were logical theories behind the concepts of 'topic' and 'comment', and I am thankful that you told me that; as you said, there were indeed “meanings” (i. e. stricter theories behind) for these notions. I do not suggest you to believe me, I only turned into words what I thought about the "philosophoical" (not scientific) foundations of this kind of theories, so please do not be offended. I do not mean any offence to _you_, instead I am thankful for your response, as I already stated in the very first post. You cannot affirm that there was no point for me asking the quesion.


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## rur1920

P.S.: my beliefs do not have anything to do with the topic of this thread; please, if you want to sort out the mis-understanding that we really have (and I will quite understand if you do not want to  ), then there is an option of doing so via personal messages.  As to the post #14, its main value is that it summarises my understanding of the “philosophical” (for lack of a better word) foundations behind the approach that the students of the ISC (information structure of communication) choose to take. I did not evade from stating my opinion about those foundations (just did not want to “кривить душой”, to “crook” the soul, i. e. to show in my actions that I was a different person than I was), but the main content of the post was that, in what appears to me, those people do proceed from foundations that I referred to, namely from these statements about truth, logic, human reasoning, and language; so then the question becomes (since a very important subtopic of this thread are their theories) whether they really do.


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

Truth values have to do with logical thinking - not with how information is structured. I could say _colorless green ideas sleep furiously_ (as made famous by Chomsky), you know, by logical thinking that this sentence makes no sense, but still it follows perfectly the laws of the English language.


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## rur1920

Deixis_am_Phantasma said:


> Truth values have to do with logical thinking - not with how information is structured. I could say _colorless green ideas sleep furiously_ (as made famous by Chomsky), you know, by logical thinking that this sentence makes no sense, but still it follows perfectly the laws of the English language.


That's the point: by logical thinking it makes no sense, but it makes total sense to me by thinking that is mine. Therefore, I don't believe logical thinking. I take it to be a useful instrument for some activities (argument is the most prominent example of such activity), but not an universal principle of reasoning. Then, information structure _is_ built by those theoreticians around logical thinking, because, as far as I understand, they define _information_, that the parties possess and exchange, through sets of beliefs that parties take to be _true_, either by convention or because of their own convictions. Then, what they posit is that communication is a structured process that changes the structure of such beliefs (what you named “a language in chunks”); those beliefs that I could not call real.

P.S.: I hope we don't turn this thread into a long discussion whether logical thinking is a universal principle of reasoning…


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## Deixis_am_Phantasma

rur1920 said:


> That's the point: by logical thinking it makes no sense, but it makes total sense to me by thinking that is mine. Therefore, I don't believe logical thinking. I take it to be a useful instrument for some activities (argument is the most prominent example of such activity), but not an universal principle of reasoning. Then, information structure _is_ built by those theoreticians around logical thinking, because, as far as I understand, they define _information_, that the parties possess and exchange, through sets of beliefs that parties take to be _true_, either by convention or because of their own convictions. Then, what they posit is that communication is a structured process that changes the structure of such beliefs (what you named “a language in chunks”); those beliefs that I could not call real.
> 
> P.S.: I hope we don't turn this thread into a long discussion whether logical thinking is a universal principle of reasoning…



Human language is a social convention. Each word you use is a social convention. There's no reason why the dog must be called 'dog', I could call it 'nzigini' but somehow during the centuries it got to be called dog. There would be no language without convention


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## Cenzontle

> In everyday discourse we do not feel we are constantly being kept in suspense.



Agreed:  The suspense is a matter of a few milliseconds and usually doesn't rise to the level of consciousness.  
Only occasionally do we hear or read the beginning of a sentence, jump to a conclusion about how it will end, and then experience surprise when it ends differently.




> Wouldn't this mean that (in general) there is a link between 'definiteness' and 'topicalization'?



Definitely (in my opinion).

Just in case there is any doubt:  The information structure of topic and comment is relevant not only in the give and take of conversation: it also works in written prose.  
The only difference is that in conversation the body of shared "knowledge" is constructed by both (or all) participants,
while in writing, the writer alone must establish a basis of old information on which to construct new information.


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## rur1920

Cenzontle said:


> Just in case there is any doubt:  The information structure of topic and comment is relevant not only in the give and take of conversation: it also works in written prose.
> The only difference is that in conversation the body of shared "knowledge" is constructed by both (or all) participants,
> while in writing, the writer alone must establish a basis of old information on which to construct new information.


If the book is not literary (one that is concerned more with posing questions than giving answers), then the writer does have to evaluate, before starting to write the book, what kind of special knowledge readers should be supposed to have of its subject, and from what approaches they should be supposed to interpret the book's content (how they are supposed to act on it, what methods of handling ideas they should be supposed to use). But otherwise, any individual reader's path of getting in touch with the material, and the kind of the material that this reader gets in touch with, is different and is not defined by the author…


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## Tunalagatta

Hi!

I teach English for Academic Purposes. I find looking at topic-comment or theme-rheme information is really useful when analysing cohesion and information flow in whole texts. It's not really useful at sentence-only level, though; it has to be part of something bigger, like a spoken dialogue, a speech or a longer written text. What I mean is, you study the sentence content/construction within the context of the whole paragraph or complete text, either spoken or written. *n.b. *I only know it from an English language perspective. I understand topic/theme to be 1st position and comment/rheme to be 2nd position, for simplicity here. Topic is generally shorter, comment is generally longer, but not always.

Basically, awareness of what is in the topic position and the comment  position helps to see how someone is developing an idea. They might  maintain or switch focus, according to the argument (or whatever) they  are making. If they want someone to be able to follow easily, there  should be some kind of logical, conceptual connection between information across clauses and sentences. Often this  involves putting known-before-new, in order to avoid totally confusing  whoever is reading or listening (or listening and speaking) by throwing in too many unfamiliar  concepts that haven't been dealt with yet in the text, or jumping about. 

There are some general patterns and tendencies of introducing 'known' information before 'new,' but there's no fixed rule. It depends on the text itself and the individual's personal style: for example, if they want to mix it up a bit and introduce a kind of surprise. It would be pretty monotonous, otherwise. However, there are some things that simply sound or look 'off' when they appear in the 'wrong' position, particularly if every topic is new, or if every comment is known. If both topic and comment are new, then it is even more of a challenge, so it shouldn't happen very often.

[My mum, for example, is terrible in conversation. She suddenly  introduces totally new ideas, sentence by sentence, that don't follow either what she, I or  anyone else has said, and it is totally disorienting. I literally  analyse her real-time spoken topic-comment constructions because it is  such a challenge for me to keep up with her train of thought! I think it  veers into incoherence as well as lack of cohesion.]

I suggest you take any written text and try to identify what is 'known,' or assumed to be known (this could even be from the title, if there is one), and what is 'new.' n.b. Use lots of coloured pens, or use software to highlight stuff!

* What position is it in? 
* Where has it appeared before (known)?
* Does it appear again (known and new)?

And 

* Does a *topic* in one sentence/clause *remain* the topic of the *next* sentence/clause?
* Does a topic make *another* appearance as a topic a few sentences *later* on? 
* Does the *comment* of a previous sentence/clause *become* the *topic* of the new sentence/clause? 
* How often does '*comment*' information *get picked up and used as 'topic'* information in *later* sentences/clauses?

And 

* Is anything in a *topic* position *new*? 
* Is anything in a *comment* position *known*?

Try to rephrase sentences by inverting the topic and comment information, adjusting the grammar accordingly. Does it sound weird now, within its particular co-text (the surrounding sentences)?

To answer your question, which I haven't done yet, I think the terms are useful because 'topic' is the starting point and 'comment' is the expansion (or narrowing, I can't decide) of that idea. It is interesting to see how that topic relates to the previous part of the text - where has it come from? And to see how it appears later, to see how comments are repackaged as topics, and to generally see the links in whole texts by using these concepts of sentence patterns.

EDIT On second thoughts, perhaps it is less useful to call things topic + comment. I think it's easier to call them 'section 1' and 'section 2,' and to see how patterns emerge like that. For me, topic/theme = section 1, comment/rheme = section 2, but I see that it is not universally understood that way. The word 'topic', just meaning 'the subject,' can be in the section 2, so it is confusing.

Before I started teaching EAP, I was a pretty good academic writer, despite never in my life having come across the terms _theme_ and _rheme_, or _topic _and _comment._  However, since studying various aspects of spoken and written discourse  in order to teach them, including theme and rheme, my own academic  writing has actually improved significantly. I am much more conscious of  how information is communicated across sentences, and I bear it in mind  when I edit my own writing, as well as my students'.


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## mataripis

Topic is subject, and subject has themes and between themes there will be comments.


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