>        Try this example instead: It is Thursday.

As difficult  as or no more difficult than
        It is raining.

From a structual point of view it is S VP SC.

From a communicative point of view:

'It' is relatively empty of meaning, so the topic it refers to is hazy as
hazy can be, so what is left is the comment, which is the only bit of
information we are interested in: the day of the week, or the state of the
weather.

While the topic often refers to information we already have ('old') and the
comment to information we have not known before ('new'), in this case there
is no old information, only new. This is also shown by the fact that these
sentence are not normally uttered in isolation but are answers - and then
the structure is different from the quoted one, only the relevant new
information is actually referred to: Thursday. Raining. These are minor
sentences.


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