ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the structural features of individual English sentences. The topic is the part of the sentence which indicates what is being written or talked about. It is basically a discourse-oriented notion, as opposed to the subject, which is part of the internal structure of the sentence. The rest of the sentence makes some sort of statement about the topic and this is called the comment. Fronting can also trigger something called inverted subjectverb order, as some of Yoda’s examples illustrate. The grammatical relations have changed: ‘the moth’ and ‘French’ are the subject and object, respectively, but the object has become detached from the rest of the sentence, separated by a distinct pause. The unmarked ordering of phrases and clauses by size within a sentence is to move from small to large. Sentence-initial is a focal position for emphasised information. Moving material to this position gives it much greater prominence.
