Herb,
   Halliday himself mentions "The Prague School" as an earlier source for these insights.
    My presentation at 4C's in Chicago next March (as part of a New Public Grammar panel) will be on "Subject Function as a Window into Functional Grammar".  It's a good starting point precisely because there is immediate payoff.  Students seem to pick it up very quickly and  find it useful.  (My grammar students have spread it into composition classes on occasion.) 
    Halliday uses the term "theme" (theme/rheme) to designate the sentence opening word group as a stepping off point for the message structure of the clause. (Rheme is what's left.) More often  than not, it is "conflated" (combined) with the grammatical subject (which is the focus of a predication, at least in a normal declarative sentence.)  You're right; theme is realized in an English clause by being first. The other subject function would be something like "actor" (though that term differs depending on what kind of representative process is being presented. In a material process clause, it's the doer of the action.)  When something other than grammatical subject opens the sentence, it's a "marked theme".  If done well (as in your fourth sentence, which begins with "in English"  or your later sentence which opens with "typically"), it gives us a highly useful (thematic) point of departure.  
   Outside, the wind blew cold.  Inside, the fire burned warm.
   If you look at the kinds of rhetorical choices open to writers, marked theme is among the most useful and most flexible.  It gives us a sort of topical stepping off point, and it also sometimes allows us to put more emphasis on other new information in clause ending emphasis slot.  (If I write "The wind blew cold outside", then cold is no longer quite so emphatic.) In this example, we can see how it works independently of (in harmony with?) given and new.  
    This is a common understanding within functional grammar, one of the ways in which it opens up a text for interpretive analysis.  (What it means and how it means are intertwined. The choices are not merely stylistic. Starting your sentence with "in English" is a highly meaningful choice.)  
    That's a very brief foray into the subject.  Students pick it up very quickly if you let them manipulate sentences and consider the nuances of meaning that result.
   
Craig
Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
[log in to unmask]"> 
Topic-comment terminology and concepts come out of several strands of functional linguistic analysis, starting at least with early Halliday work and probably going back farther than that.  Topic has been discussed extensively in connection with definitions of subjecthood.  The Chinese example that Johanna gave is an example why linguists argue that Chinese is a topic-comment language rather than a subject-predicate language.  Topic comes initially in a sentence, but there is no other grammatical or morphological marking of subjecthood in Chinese.  In English, subjects are usually topics, but we have structures, like some of those under discussion in this thread, which allow us to make something else topic.  We also have sentences that start with subjects that aren't topics, like

It's raining.
It looks like UCLA will win the PAC-10.
There's an elephant behind that tree.

Typically such sentences are used to introduce new content (focus) at the end of the sentence that then becomes the topic of the discourse.

"Topical" refers usually to nominal structures in a sentence that are neither topic nor focus, have been previously mentioned or are in some other way salient, and are not in topic or focus position.  In the sequence

I just talked to Mary.  John gave her a ring.  It had a fake stone.

"Mary" is in focus.  "John" is topic.  "her" is topical, and "a ring" is in focus.  "It" is topic, and "a fake stone" is in focus, so it might well become the subject of the next sentence.

Topic continuity and the given-new contract are concepts that can be very useful in the teaching of writing because they name crucial elements of discourse structure.

Herb
Herb


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Paul E. Doniger
Sent: Sun 10/30/2005 9:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Syntax question
 
Johanna is right. I didn't know that the reduntant pronoun was called "topic-comment" (it sounds like an odd term to me), but it seems to me that it can be very effective rhythmically. Labelling it as ungrammatical in all cases does seem extreme. 
 
It occurs in French, too. I think it's a song by Edith Piaf that has the line, "Quand j'ai fame, moi j'ai le pain." It's a downright beautiful line!
 
Paul D.

Johanna Rubba <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

..........


As to topic-comment, this terminology appears in some writing manuals 
with reference to structures such as "My father, he seldom votes". They 
are labeled outright ungrammatical, which I find a little extreme. I 
view the Beowulf example as similar. Topic-comment syntax is standard 
in some languages. A rough example I recall from my 
structure-of-Chinese course is "Elephant, nose is long", which would be 
translated as "Elephants have long noses". I can imagine a novice 
writer writing something like "As far as elephants, they have long 
noses".


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