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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 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 *a) the phrase in a clause that the rest of the clause is understood to be about, *b) the phrase in a discourse that the rest of the discourse is understood to be about, *c) a special position in a clause (often at the right or left-edge of the clause) where topics typically appear. 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''. In English it is also possible to use other sentence structures to show the topic of the sentence, as in the following: *(3) ''As for the little girl'', the dog bit her. *(4) ''It'' was the little girl the dog bit. A distinction must be made between the ''clause-level topic'' and the ''discourse-level topic''. Suppose we are talking about Mike's house: *(5) ''Mike's house'' was very comfortable and warm! ''He'' really didn't want to leave, but he couldn't afford the rent, you know. ''And it'' had such a nice garden in the back! 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: *(6) It is raining. *(7) There is some room in this house. *(8) There are two days in the year in which the day and the night are equal in length. 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). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Topic and comment」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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