Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background, Given/New.

Tom wrote:
>Given vs. New --
>The "Given" is the part of the utterance that the speaker expects the
>addressee already knows or at least should already know; the "New" is the
>part of the utterance that is new, or at least new relative to this
>discourse and new relative to the "Given".
>
>Topic vs. Comment --
>The topic is what the utterance is about; the comment is what is uttered
>about the topic.
I've never really understood the difference between 'topic' and
'given (information)'. What does 'about' mean in this context?

It's a fundamental feature of my 'lang T4 that given information is
expressed in the first half of the sentence (subject, roughly speaking)
and new information in the second half (~predicate). All sentences have
both. Tom, you say that a sentence may or may not have both given and
new information; I'd be interested to see examples which have only one
of these, to see how I'd render them in T4.

Jonathan.
==

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