earticle

영어

The terms ‘theme’ and ‘topic’ in information structure have been used without conceptual distinction. So there was conceptual confusion in many discussions. This paper suggests that it is necessary to analyze how the topic-comment structure introduced by Lambrecht(1994) is related to the theme-rheme structure discussed in Halliday(1967) in Korean sentences. Based on the fact that the most important property of the theme is sentence-initial and that of the topic is aboutness, it is pointed out that the sentence-initial constituent of a sentence is the theme and the topic is an active element about which new information is added to the listener. A preposed object with clitic -(n)un in the sentence-initial is analysed as not a topic but a contrastive focus in Korean. And the sentence-initial that represents the possessor and possession marked with -(n)un is not only a topic as a whole but also its possessor could be a topic.