Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The placement of the topic at the beginning of a sentence, as in That movie, you couldn't pay me to see.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun linguistics The placing of the
topic of asentence at the beginning.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (linguistics) emphasis placed on the topic or focus of a sentence by preposing it to the beginning of the sentence; placing the topic at the beginning of the sentence is typical for English
Etymologies
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Examples
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Outside of poetic writing and certain syntactic alternations like topicalization, the word order of Modern English is Subject-Verb-Object.
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Outside of poetic writing and certain syntactic alternations like topicalization, the word order of Modern English is Subject-Verb-Object.
Whoever v. Whomever! Cases collide! Match of the Century! « Motivated Grammar 2009
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As linguists themselves note (see Appendix), definitions are not yet available which are stringent enough to allow tagging for topic, topicalization, and focus according to anything like a straightforward algorithm.
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In addition, the terms "topic," "topicalization," and "focus" are used in very different ways in the linguistic literature.
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For instance, they used inflectional markers in an inconsistent way and often failed to respect the structure-dependence of the rules governing topicalization in that language. [
Innateness and Language Cowie, Fiona 2008
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