Topic (linguistics)
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In linguistics, the topic (or theme) is the part of the proposition that is being talked about (predicated). Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. the things already mentioned and understood. For example, the topic is emphasized in italics in the following sentences:
The topic is also called theme, and the predicate that gives information on the topic is also called rheme.
A distinction must be made between the sentence-level topic and the discourse-level topic. Suppose we are talking about Mike's house:
- 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.
Many languages, like English, resort to different means in order to signal a new topic, such as:
There are some other languages, like Japanese or Korean, that work directly on a topic-comment frame. A new topic is always introduced in a specific way, like with a topic marker (Japanese uses a suffix, wa). The topic can be the subject or the object of a verb, but it can also be an indirect object or even an oblique complement of any kind. It is always dislocated to the front of the sentence.
Signaling the topic as such serves the pragmatic function of avoiding repetition. In many languages, old topics are replaced with a pronoun. Pro-drop languages like Japanese tend simply to delete the old topic, which is then left implicit throughout the discourse until a new one appears.
