The “Topic-Comment” Structure as a Universal Mental Substrate of an Utterance

The article tackles the problems of some approaches to the notions of sentence and utterance, whose form seldom coincides. The author analyses a number of variants that help address the issue, in particular the functional sentence perspective and its key terms – theme and rheme, which are in some works equivalent to the topic and comment notions. Grounding on research in the sphere of psycholinguistics and oriental languages (topic-prominent languages) the author assumes that mismatches in form between the sentence and the utterance are the mismatches in the realization of a deep, pre-syntactic structure “topic – comment” on a syntactic level. The given structure serves as a universal mental substrate of any utterance, which is based upon the studies in uni- and bi-component utterances performed by the author. Today it’s of utter importance to provide a deeper research in the field.