1.2. Cohesive texts: topic comes before comment

Another useful distinction to draw here is topic vs comment. Even though it interacts very closely with the given-new distinction just discussed, there are occasions when they part company.

The topic or the theme is the part of the sentence which indicates what is being written or talked about, it is the perspective from which a sentence may be viewed and is therefore typically given. There are, however, occasions when the topic doesn’t coincide with old information. The rest of the sentence makes some sort of statement about the topic and this is called the comment or the rheme. In the natural order of things, the comment, providing the new information, follows on from its topic. Topic and comment are terms, which refer to the informational aspects of sentence meaning, whereas subject and predicate refer to the grammatical functions. More often than not subjects and topics coincide and so do predicates and comments.

It was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill.

Here important new information goes in the final part of each clause. The chaining effect is achieved by the shift of the communicative value of these pieces of information: in each of the following clauses the new information is repeated as old. If we reverse this order, there is no longer the clear topic-comment arrangement because each subject introduces something new and thus we have a mere enumeration.

A hobbit-hole was it, and comfort means just that. A perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle was part of it. A tube shaped hall was like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke was opened onto by the door. On and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill wound the tunnel.

1.3. Front-focus: initial position for extra focus

We’ve just seen that ends of sentences are important for communication, because they contain what is of special significance. But beginnings of sentences can be positions of special focus. By bringing forward material which would usually be placed last, the effect is to give it much greater prominence. Normally it’s the subject that appears in initial position, other arrangements are therefore less usual and are more marked.

2. Discourse Strategies

We assume that there is a basic English clause structure from which we may deviate for the sorts of discourse reasons. As you can probably see, the existence of the basic SVX order has brought with it a potential conflict between grammar and discourse: in short, English grammar requires fixed word order, while discourse requires word order rearrangements for communicative and expressive ends. Now in the language we have at our disposal a number of what could be called subject-forming strategies. In addition we have things called empty subjects which simply function as subject place-holders. Both these developments allow movement of material without violating grammar so that every sentence has a subject in the left-most position before the verb.