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Concept
Topic and comment
Summary
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. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases the boundary between them depends on which specific grammatical theory is being used to analyze the sentence.
The topic of a sentence is distinct from the grammatical subject. The topic is defined by pragmatic considerations, that is, the context that provides meaning. The grammatical subject is defined by syntax. In any given sentence the topic and grammatical subject may be the same, but they need not be. 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".
Topic being what is being talked about and the subject being what is doing the action can, also, be distinct concepts from the concept agent (or actor)—the "doer", which is defined by semantics, that is, by the contextual meaning of the sentence in the paragraph. 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. 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 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. Korean and Japanese are often given as examples of this.
The sentence- or clause-level "topic", or "theme", can be defined in a number of different ways. Among the most common are
the phrase in a clause that the rest of the clause is understood to be about,
a special position in a clause (often at the right or left-edge of the clause) where topics typically appear.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood
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Word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are the constituent order of a clause, namely the relative order of subject, object, and verb; the order of modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in a noun phrase; the order of adverbials.
English language
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family. It originated in early medieval England and, today, is the most spoken language in the world and the third most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states. There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.
Inversion (linguistics)
In linguistics, inversion is any of several grammatical constructions where two expressions switch their canonical order of appearance, that is, they invert. There are several types of subject-verb inversion in English: locative inversion, directive inversion, copular inversion, and quotative inversion. The most frequent type of inversion in English is subject–auxiliary inversion in which an auxiliary verb changes places with its subject; it often occurs in questions, such as Are you coming?, with the subject you is switched with the auxiliary are.