Talk:Topic (linguistics)

Hi, the redirect from "Theme and Rheme" is wrong. It's a different concept. --Trickstar 12:33, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

A lot of the information seems to be incorrect. The example at the beginning miss the point - in English, one cannot say for a single utterance what its topic is without hearing its prosody or at least seeing it in context. Also the primary way of expressing theme-rheme is intonation. --Jirka6 03:09, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

This doesn't make sense at all:


 * Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. the things already mentioned and understood. For example, the topic is emphasized like this in the following sentences:
 * It was the little girl that the dog bit.

I can't see how the topic the little girl is old news in this sentence. The dog's biting is old news. It's the so-called topic that offers new information, which is to emphasise the little girl (as opposed to someone else) as the victim.
 * Bathrobe (talk) 14:56, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Examples need context
It does not make sense to talk about theme out of context. In the examples, both the little girl and the dog bit can be topics, depending on context. Actually, they are both old news -- they both are definite. But theme and old news are independent (yes, there are correlations, but old does not need to be topic) Jirka6 (talk) 16:40, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I've rewritten this article
Please have a look at the rewrite and see if it is more comprehensible to a non-linguist. --G.broadwell (talk) 17:19, 7 April 2009 (UTC)