How a sentence packages what is already known against what is new.
Also called: topic and focus.
In precise terms
The organisation of an utterance with respect to the discourse status of its parts — topic and comment, focus and background, given and new. Languages encode it with word order, particles, intonation or dedicated syntax.
An example
象は鼻が長い。
As for elephants, the trunk is long.
What is going on here
Japanese 'は' marks the topic and 'が' the subject. Both appear here, which is why the sentence has no clean English equivalent: English must choose a subject and use intonation or a cleft to do the topic's work.
Why this matters when you are learning a language
This is the layer that makes speech sound natural rather than merely correct. Word-order freedom in case languages exists largely to serve information structure, and learners who ignore it produce grammatical but oddly emphasised sentences.
Across languages
Japanese and Korean mark topic with particles; Russian and Czech use word order; English leans heavily on intonation and cleft constructions. Some languages have a dedicated syntactic focus position.
Related terms
- Word orderIntermediate — The order in which subject, verb and object normally appear.
- SubjectBeginner — The part of a clause that the verb agrees with — usually who or what performs the action.
- PragmaticsAdvanced — How context supplies meaning that the words alone do not carry.
- DeixisAdvanced — Words whose meaning depends entirely on who is speaking, where and when — 'I', 'here', 'yesterday'.
Where to go next
- Language guides — See grammatical and lexical categories used in context.
- Terminology quiz — Test the terms on this page.