In
linguistics, the
topic (or
theme) is the part of the proposition that is being talked about (
predicated). Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. the things already mentioned and understood. For example, the topic is emphasized in
italics in the following
sentencesThe topic is also called theme, and the predicate that gives information on the topic is also called rheme.
A distinction must be made between the sentence-level topic and the discourse-level topic. Suppose we are talking about Mike's house
In the example, the discourse-level topic is established in the first sentence it is Mike's house. In the following sentence, a new "local" topic is established on the sentence level he (Mike). But the discourse-level topic is still Mike's house, which is why the last comment does not seem out of place.
