Topic, Comment, and Givenness
Topic is what an utterance is about, comment is what is said about it, and givenness tracks how accessible referents are in the discourse.
Definition
Topic is the entity an utterance is about; comment is the predication made about it; givenness is the cognitive status of a referent in terms of its accessibility or prior introduction in the discourse.
Scope
This topic covers the aboutness notion of topic and its comment, the related theme-rheme distinction from the Prague School, and givenness: the degree to which a referent is already present or salient in the discourse and how this conditions the choice of referring expression. It includes Reinhart's analysis of sentence topics, the Givenness Hierarchy relating cognitive status to pronominal and definite forms, and the way topic and givenness are marked through word order, prosody, and dedicated constructions such as topicalization.
Core questions
- What does it mean for an utterance to have a topic, and how is aboutness defined?
- How does givenness influence the form of referring expressions?
- How are topic and givenness marked across languages?
- How do topic and givenness relate to focus?
Key concepts
- topic and comment
- aboutness
- theme and rheme
- givenness / cognitive status
- Givenness Hierarchy
- topicalization
- referring expression choice
Key theories
- Aboutness topics (Reinhart)
- Sentence topics are analysed in terms of aboutness, the entity under which the information conveyed is stored, and are distinguished from focus and from merely given material.
- Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski)
- Referring expressions encode the cognitive status of their referents along an implicational hierarchy (from in-focus to uniquely identifiable), so the choice between pronouns, demonstratives, and full descriptions reflects givenness.
History
The theme-rheme distinction originates in the Prague School functional sentence perspective of Mathesius and his successors. Reinhart sharpened the notion of aboutness topic in 1981, and Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski's 1993 Givenness Hierarchy connected cognitive status to the choice of referring expressions, both feeding into general theories of information structure such as Krifka's.
Debates
- Whether topic is a grammatical or purely pragmatic notion
- Whether aboutness topics correspond to identifiable syntactic positions and marking, or are a discourse-pragmatic category only loosely tied to grammatical form.
Key figures
- Tanya Reinhart
- Jeanette Gundel
- Manfred Krifka
- Vilem Mathesius
Related topics
Seminal works
- reinhart1981
- gundel1993
Frequently asked questions
- How does givenness affect which referring expression is used?
- Highly given, in-focus referents are typically realized with reduced forms like unstressed pronouns, whereas less accessible referents require fuller forms such as demonstratives or full definite descriptions, as captured by the Givenness Hierarchy.