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( October 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. The topic/theme comes first in the clause, and is typically marked out by intonation as well. In many languages, pronouns referring to previously established topics will show pro-drop. When a sentence continues discussing a previously established topic, it is likely to use pronouns to refer to the topic. Languages often show different kinds of grammar for sentences that introduce new topics and those that continue discussing previously established topics. Again, linguists disagree on many details. Of a clause regardless whether it is marked or not. Topic fronting refers to placing the topic at the beginning The tendency to place topicalized constituents sentence-initially ("topic fronting") is widespread. Distinct intonation and word-order are the most common means. For example: " " Realization of topic–comment ĭifferent languages mark topics in different ways. The relation between topic/theme and comment/rheme/focus should not be confused with the topic-comment relation in Rhetorical Structure Theory-Discourse Treebank (RST-DT corpus) where it is defined as "a general statement or topic of discussion is introduced, after which a specific remark is made on the statement or topic". In all these cases, the whole sentence refers to the comment part. In these sentences the topic is never the subject, but is determined pragmatically. 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.
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In some languages, word order and other syntactic phenomena are determined largely by the topic–comment (theme–rheme) structure. For example, in the sentence "The little girl was bitten by the dog", "the little girl" is the subject and the topic, but "the dog" is the agent. In English clauses with a verb in the passive voice, for instance, the topic is typically the subject, while the agent may be omitted or may follow the preposition by. Topic and subject are also distinct concepts from agent (or actor)-the "doer", which is defined by semantics. For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog" but the topic is "the little girl". In any given sentence these may be the same, but they need not be. Topic, which is defined by pragmatic considerations, is a distinct concept from grammatical subject, which is defined by syntax. comment, but in certain cases the boundary between them depends on which specific grammatical theory is being used to analyze the sentence. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. new content is called information structure. 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.
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