ABSTRACT
We have considered different notions of topic in the literature and suggested that in order to understand the role of this concept in a particular language, we have to take into account the syntactic characteristics of the language, which may be crucial, for instance, for the potential correlation between topic and subject. We have seen that in the absence of particular phonological or syntactic special features, subjects, and more specifically, preverbal subjects can be considered to be unmarked topical phrases and can be very easily accommodated as such in out-of-the-blue utterances.1 However, we have pointed out that the differences between English and Spanish, such as the (im)possibility of having postverbal and null subjects, are crucial for this correlation and should be taken into account. As we are going to see below in more detail, a consequence of these differences is, for instance, that while a) an active topical element, b) an inactive topical element and c) a nontopical element can be all syntactically expressed by a preverbal subject in English, only b) would be expressed by a preverbal subject in Spanish. An active topical element would be expressed by a null subject and a nontopical by a postverbal subject.2
