Topic and comment

In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. That the information structure of a clause is divided in this way is generally agreed on, but the boundary between topic/theme depends on grammatical theory.

The difference between "topic" and grammatical subject is that topic is used to describe the information structure, or pragmatic structure of a clause and how it coheres with other clauses, whereas the subject is a purely grammatical category. For example, it is possible to have clauses where the subject is not the topic, such as in passive voice. In some languages, word order and other syntactic phenomena are determined largely by the topic–comment (theme–rheme) structure. These languages are sometimes referred to as topic-prominent languages. Chinese and Japanese are often given as examples of this.

The distinction was probably first suggested by Henri Weil in 1844. Georg von der Gabelentz distinguished psychological subject (roughly topic) and psychological object (roughly focus). In the Prague school, the dichotomy, termed topic–focus articulation, has been studied mainly by Vilém Mathesius, Jan Firbas, František Daneš, Petr Sgall and Eva Hajičová. They have been concerned mainly by its relation to intonation and word-order. The work of Michael Halliday in the 1960s is responsible for developing linguistic science through his systemic functional linguistics model for English (see e.g. Halliday 1967–68, 1970)

Comment (1958 TV series)

Comment is an Australian television series which aired 1958 to 1960 on Sydney station ATN-7. In the series, George Baker interviewed prominent people. It aired in a single city only, typical of early Australian series. Archival status is not known.

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Comment (computer programming)

In computer programming, a comment is a programmer-readable annotation in the source code of a computer program. They are added with the purpose of making the source code easier to understand, and are generally ignored by compilers and interpreters. The syntax of comments in various programming languages varies considerably.

As well as of direct use to any programmer reading the source code, comments are sometimes processed in various ways to generate documentation external to the source code itself by documentation generators, or used for integration with source code management systems and other kinds of external programming tools.

The flexibility provided by comments allows for a wide degree of variability, but formal conventions for their use are commonly part of programming style guides.

Overview

Comments are generally formatted as either block comments (also called prologue comments or stream comments) or line comments (also called inline comments).

Block comments delimit a region of source code which may span multiple lines. This region is specified with a start delimiter and an end delimiter. Some programming languages (such as MATLAB) allow block comments to be recursively nested inside one another, but others (such as Java) do not.

General (Sweden)

General, Finnish: kenraali is the highest officer's rank in Sweden and Finland. In Sweden, it is held by the Supreme Commander (Swedish: överbefälhavare) of the Swedish Armed Forces and the monarch. In Finland, it is held by the Chief of Defence. In Sweden, the monarch still holds the nominal rank of General as well as Admiral and General of the Air Force.

Finnish Defence Forces rank of kenraali is comparable to Ranks of NATO armies officers as OF-9.

Holders of the rank in Sweden

Holders of the rank in Finland

In peacetime the rank of Full General is reserved for the Commander of Finnish Defence Forces. Sometimes a General's branch of service is indicated in the rank. So far Finland has had seventeen of jalkaväenkenraali (General of Infantry), a few of jääkärikenraali (Jägergeneral), two of ratsuväenkenraali (General of Cavalry) and one tykistönkenraali (General of Artillery). Marshal Mannerheim himself was the other one of the two Generals of Cavalry before his promotion to Field Marshal.

General (comics)

General, in comics, may refer to:

It may also refer to:

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General (train)

The General (train numbers 48 and 49) was the Pennsylvania Railroad's number two train between New York and Chicago. Only a bit slower than the Broadway Limited, it had no extra fare and for a time before World War Two, carried more passengers than the Broadway Limited or the New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited.

The General was inaugurated in 1937, and carried coaches and Pullmans. It received some new lightweight equipment in 1938 as part of the fleet of modernism, but it was mostly heavyweight until 1940. It was the only "Fleet of Modernism" train to be streamlined without an observation car. It lost its coaches when the Advance General was inaugurated in 1940. It was re-equipped with lightweight sleeping cars from both the pre-war Broadway, and new cars from post-war orders. At this time, it also carried the Broadway's pre-war observation cars. In 1951 the General lost its all-Pullman status when it was combined with the all-coach Trail Blazer for non-peak travel periods only. In 1952 this consolidation became permanent, and by 1960, the Trail Blazer name was dropped. In 1967 the General was renamed the Broadway Limited when that train lost its numbers and all-Pullman status.