Topic is usually characterized as what the sentence is about, the rest of the sentence expresses a proposition about the topic, and it is referred to as comment. Topic, as it conveys given information, serves as a starting point of a message. Comment, being something to be said about topic, is expected to convey something new or important, and thus is where the End-Focus is to be located. It is obvious that there is a one-to-one relation between ‘Given’ in contrast to ‘New’ on the one hand and topic in contrast to focus on the other.
[1] Loar, J. K. (2011). Chinese syntactic grammar: functional and conceptual principles. New York: Peter Lang.
