In linguistics, the topic (or theme) is informally what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. Although this general nature of topic-comment dichotomy is generally accepted, anything beyond that is a matter of great controversy. The distinction was probably first suggested by Henri Weil in 1844. Georg von der Gabelentz distinguished psychological subject (roughly topic) and psychological object (roughly focus). In the Prague school, the dichotomy has been studied mainly by Vilém Mathesius, Jan Firbas, František Daneš, Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová. They were concerned mainly by its relation to intonation and word-order. The work of Michael Halliday in the 1960s is probably responsible for bringing the ideas to Generative Linguistics.
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