In linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words, the topic (or theme) is informally what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. Although this general nature of topic-comment dichotomy is generally accepted, anything beyond that is a matter of great controversy.
The distinction was probably first suggested by Henri Weil Henri Weil was a German-born French Jewish philologist in 1844. Georg von der Gabelentz distinguished psychological subject (roughly topic) and psychological object (roughly focus). In the Prague school The Prague Linguistic Circle or "Prague school" was an influential group of literary critics and linguists in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis during the years 1928–1939. It has had significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After World War II, the circle was disbanded but, the dichotomy, termed topic-focus articulation, has been studied mainly by Vilém Mathesius, Jan Firbas, František Daneš, Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová Eva Hajičová is a Czech linguist, specializing in topic-focus articulation and corpus linguistics. In 2006, she was awarded the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award. They have been concerned mainly by its relation to intonation and word-order. The work of Michael Halliday in the 1960s is probably responsible for bringing the ideas to Functional Grammar Functional Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) are grammar models and theories motivated by functional theories of grammar. These theories explain how linguistic utterances are shaped, based on the goals and knowledge of natural language users. In doing so, it contrasts with Chomskyan transformational grammar. Functional Discourse.
Note that in some categorizations, topic refers only to the contrastive theme and comment to the noncontrastive theme + rheme.
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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 sentence, the subject is normally the same as the topic. For example, the topic is emphasized in italics in the following sentences:
- (1) The dog licked the little girl.
- (2) The little girl was licked by the dog.
Although these sentences mean the same thing, they have different topics. The first sentence is about the dog, while the second is 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 licked her.
A distinction must be made between the clause-level topic and the discourse-level topic. Suppose we are talking about Mike's house:
- (4) Mike's house was so 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 sentence: it is Mike's house. In the following sentence, a new "local" topic is established on the sentence 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.
Realization of topic/comment
Different languages Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so-called "natural languages" — the spoken forms of communication ubiquitous among humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of 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.
- English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, via: intonation is the primary means, although word order (e.g., fronting of contrasted topics: Kim, I like.) and other syntactic (passivisation, clefting A cleft sentence is a complex sentence which has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus. This focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation) or lexical means ("As for...", "Regarding...") are also employed.
- Japanese Japanese (日本語, Nihongo?, [nihoŋɡo] ) is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an: topic is marked with a special clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level postposition In grammar, a preposition is a part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. For example, in the sentence "The cat sleeps on the sofa", the word "on" is a preposition, introducing the prepositional phrase "on the sofa". In English, the most used prepositions are "of", "to", "in", (は, -wa); see a presentation about this problem in Japanese [1].
- So called free-word order languages (e.g. Russian Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three (or four including Rusyn) living members of the East Slavic languages. Written examples of Old East Slavonic are, Czech Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian until the late 19th century in English. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Sorbian, to a certain extent Chinese Chinese or the Sinitic language (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages or German German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers) use word-order as the primary means. Usually topic precedes focus. However, for example in Czech, both orders are possible. The order with comment sentence-initial is referred as subjective (V. Mathesius' term, as opposed to objective) and expresses certain emotional involvement. The two orders are distinguished by intonation.
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
- Topic-prominent language A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax to emphasize the topic–comment structure of the sentence. The term is best known in American linguistics from Li , who distinguished topic-prominent languages, like Japanese, from subject-prominent languages, like English
- Focus (linguistics) Focus is a concept in linguistic theory that deals with how information in one phrase relates to information that has come before. Focus has been analyzed in a variety of ways by linguists. Historically, there have been two main approaches to focus – the generative approach and the functional approach. In the generative approach, the term focus
- Thematic equative In English, a thematic equative is a thematic resource in which two or more separate elements in a clause are grouped together to form a single constituent of the theme-plus-rheme structure. An example of this is:
- Topic particle
- Predicate (grammar) In traditional grammar, a predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence . For the simple sentence "John [is yellow]," John acts as the subject, and is yellow acts as the predicate, a subsequent description of the subject headed with a verb
References
- Givón, Talmy Talmy "Tom" Givón is a linguist and educator and one of the founders of functionalism in linguistics. He also founded the linguistics department at the University of Oregon based on his functionalist approach to the subject. 1983a. Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam: Arshdeep Singh.
- Hajičová, Eva Eva Hajičová is a Czech linguist, specializing in topic-focus articulation and corpus linguistics. In 2006, she was awarded the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, Partee, Barbara H., Sgall, Petr. 1998. Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 71. Dordrecht: Kluwer. (ix + 216 pp.) review
- Hockett, Charles F. Charles Francis Hockett was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism". His academic career spanned over half a century in Cornell and Rice. 1958. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: The Macmillan Company. (pp. 191-208)
- Mathesius, Vilém. 1975. A Functional Analysis of Present Day English on a General Linguistic Basis. edited by Josef Vachek, translated by Libuše Dušková. The Hague - Paris: Mouton.
- Kadmon, Nirit. 2001. Pragmatics Blackwell Publishers. Blackwell Publishers.
- Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Li, Charles N., Thompson, Sandra A. 1976. Subject and Topic: A New Typology of Languages, in: Li, Charles N. (ed.) Subject and Topic, New York/San Francisco/London: Academic Press, 457-490.
- Payne, Thomas E. 1997. Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Von der Gabelentz, Georg. 1891. Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. Leipzig: T.O. Weigel Nachfolger.
- Weil, Henri Henri Weil was a German-born French Jewish philologist. 1887. De l'ordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparées aux langues modernes: question de grammaire générale. 1844. Published in English as The order of words in the ancient languages compared with that of the modern languages.
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