Re: Fishing for Complements?

>Why not call it topic - that's what it is, more or less, and there
>are no rules that say that a topic must always be sentence-initial.
>Perhaps you've just discovered the comment-topic construction ;-).
>Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt
Well, "topic" seems to be more semantic than syntactic.   A topic is what
the sentence is about, which is different from the constituent in the
sentence that REFERS to what the sentences is about.

But perhaps I'm being too picky here:   after all, nothing is stopping me
from calling my "subject" a "topic noun phrase."    I still like "subject"
better though, because it's more familiar and speaks to syntactic properties
like deletability more than 'topic noun phrase' does.

Still, I appreciate your suggestions, and will welcome further input on this
subject.

Jim