Termenul „topică” are două accepţiuni.

Pe de o parte este o ramură a sintaxei sau a stilisticii

care se ocupă cu studiul ordinii cuvintelor în sintagme, a părţilor de propoziţie în propoziţii şi a
propoziţiilor în fraze. Pe de altă parte, topica desemnează însăşi ordinea părţilor de propoziţie,
respectiv a propoziţiilor. Când se vorbeşte despre topica unei anumite părţi de propoziţie sau a
unui anumit tip de propoziţie, aceasta înseamnă locul lor faţă de celelalte părţi de propoziţie,
respectiv propoziţii.

În funcţie de limbă, topica poate fi mai mult sau mai puţin liberă. Topica liberă nu se
supune vreunor reguli, vreunei restricţii, fiind la latitudinea vorbitorului sau a scriitorului,
schimbarea ei neavând ca urmare modificarea raporturilor sintactice, pe când cea fixă
presupune reguli şi restricţii a căror încălcare duce la schimbarea raporturilor sintactice.
Din alt punct de vedere, topica poate fi obiectivă (logică, directă) sau afectivă (subiectivă,
inversă). Cea obiectivă urmează logica gândirii obişnuită într-o limbă dată, pe când cea
afectivă scoate în relief anumite cuvinte sau grupuri de cuvinte prin schimbarea locului lor
faţă de cel conform topicii obiective, pe lângă accentuarea lor mai puternică, din
considerente pragmatice, fără ca regulile sintactice ale limbii să fie afectate. Topica şi
tipologia lingvistică

Topica joacă un rol în tipologia lingvistică sintactică a limbilor din mai multe puncte de vedere,
dintre care unul este locul subiectului, al predicatului şi al complementului direct al predicatului
unele faţă de altele în propoziţia enunţiativă, independentă sau principală, cu subiectul şi
complementul direct exprimate prin substantiv, şi neutră din punctul de vedere al importanţei
date de vorbitor uneia sau alteia dintre aceste părţi de propoziţie. Asfel se disting şase tipuri de
limbi, desemnate prin siglele formate din iniţialele cuvintelor englezeşti subject „subiect”, verb
„verb” şi object „complement direct”: SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV şi OVS. Româna, de
exemplu, este din acest punct de vedere o limbă SVO.

[modificare] Topica în limba română

În limba română topica este relativ liberă, adică nu este fixă, ca în limbile în care predicatul sau
atributul adjectival nu pot sta decât într-un anumit loc. Totodată, ea nu este nici absolut liberă,
adică în general există preferinţă pentru o anumită topică, uneori aceasta fiind chiar fixă, de
exemplu în cazul unor pronume personale neaccentuate (Îl văd., Am văzut-o.), în cel al
propoziţiilor coordonate adversative (Nu scrie, ci dictează.) şi conclusive (Am promis, deci vin.),
al subordonatelor atributive propriu-zise (A trimis observatori care să-i relateze tot.) sau al
consecutivelor propriu-zise (Erau atâţia călători, încât n-aveau loc.)

În unele cazuri topica este liberă, fără să existe vreo diferenţă de sens, de accentuare sau afectivă
între variante: elevul cel mai bun / cel mai bun elev, patul celălalt / celălalt pat. De cele mai
multe ori însă, topica poate avea mai multe funcţii, rămânând în cadrul obiectivităţii:

 Funcţia gramaticală (sintactică) constă în a marca rolul diferit al unor părţi de propoziţie
sau propoziţii cu aceeaşi formă: Ion este prietenul meu. vs. Prietenul meu este Ion.
 Prin funcţia sa lexicală (semantică), topica diferenţiază sensuri lexicale ale unui cuvânt: o
nouă rochie „alta, încă una” vs. o rochie nouă „nu veche”.
  Funcţia stilistică a topicii are două aspecte obiective. Pe de o parte caracterizează un
anumit stil al limbii: steagul nostru (limba comună) vs. al nostru steag (stilul poetic). Pe
de altă parte serveşte la reliefarea unui element al propoziţiei sau al frazei din cauza
importanţei sale, prin asociere cu accentuarea sa mai puternică în vorbire. În acest sens,
topica poate fi foarte variată. Exemplu:

Mama le-a dat copiilor mere la ora patru. (nicio parte de propoziţie accentuată)

Mama le-a dat mere copiilor la ora patru. / Mama le-a dat copiilor mere la ora patru. (accentul
pe subiect, poziţiile complementului direct şi complementului indirect fiind interschimbabile)

Le-a dat mama mere copiilor la ora patru. (accentul pe predicat)

Mere le-a dat mama copiilor la ora patru. / Mama mere le-a dat copiilor la ora patru. (accentul
pe complementul direct)

Copiilor le-a dat mama mere la ora patru. / Mama copiilor le-a dat mere la ora patru.[1]
(accentul pe complementul indirect)

La ora patru le-a dat mama mere copiilor. / Mama la ora patru le-a dat mere copiilor. (accentul
pe complementul circumstanţial de timp)

Funcţia stilistică a topicii are şi un aspect subiectiv, care constă în a schimba locul unui element
din necesităţi de ordin afectiv: Ţi-a făcut bine. vs. Bine ţi-a făcut!

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents
of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between
orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest. The primary word orders that
are of interest are the constituent order of a clause—the relative order of subject, object, and
verb; the order of modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessives, and adjuncts) in
a noun phrase; and the order of adverbials.

Some languages have relatively restrictive word orders, often relying on the order of constituents
to convey important grammatical information. Others, often those that convey grammatical
information through inflection, allow more flexibility which can be used to encode pragmatic
information such as topicalisation or focus. Most languages however have some preferred word
order which is used most frequently.[1]

For most nominative–accusative languages which have a major word class of nouns and clauses
which include subject and object, constituent word order is commonly defined in terms of the
finite verb (V) and its arguments, the subject (S) and object (O).[2][3][4][5]

There are six theoretically possible basic word orders for the transitive sentence: subject verb
object (SVO), subject object verb (SOV), verb subject object (VSO), verb object subject (VOS),
object subject verb (OSV) and object verb subject (OVS). The overwhelming majority of the
world's languages are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using
VSO word order. The remaining three arrangements are exceptionally rare, with VOS being
slightly more common than OSV, and OVS being significantly more rare than the two preceding
orders

Finding the basic constituent order

It is not always easy to find the basic word order of S, O and V. First, not all languages make use
of the categories of subject and object. In others, the subject and object may not form a clause
with the verb. If subject and object can be identified within a clause, the problem can arise that
different orders prevail in different contexts. For instance, French has SVO for nouns, but SOV
when pronouns are involved; German has verb-medial order in main clauses, but verb-final order
in subordinate clauses. In other languages the word order of transitive and intransitive clauses
may not correspond. In still others, the rules for ordering S, O, and V may exist, but be
secondary to (and often overruled by) more fundamental ordering rules--e.g., for considerations
such as topic-comment. To have a valid base for comparison, the basic word order is defined[by
whom?]
as:

 declarative
 main clause
 S and O must both be nominal arguments
 pragmatically neutral, i.e. no element has special emphasis

While the first two of these requirements are relatively easy to respect, the latter two are more
difficult. In spoken language, there are hardly ever two full nouns in a clause; the norm is for the
clause to have at most one noun, the other arguments being pronouns.[citation needed] In written
language, this is somewhat different, but that is of no help when investigating oral languages.
Finally, the notion of "pragmatically neutral" is difficult to test. While the English sentence "The
king, they killed." has a heavy emphasis on king, in other languages, that order (OSV) might not
carry a significantly higher emphasis than another order.

If all the requirements above are met, it still sometimes turns out that languages do not seem to
prefer any particular word order. The last resort is text counts, but even then, some languages
must be analyzed as having two (or even more) word orders.

[edit] Constituent word orders

These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common
to rarest (the examples use "I" as the subject, "see" as the verb, and "him" as the object):

 SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it
include the prototypical Japanese, Mongolian, Basque, Turkish, Korean, the Indo-Aryan
 languages and the Dravidian languages. Some, like Persian and Latin, have SOV normal
word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages. A
sentence glossing as "I him see" would be grammatically correct in these languages.
 SVO languages include English, the Romance languages, Bulgarian, Chinese and
Swahili, among others. "I see him."
 VSO languages include Classical Arabic, the Insular Celtic languages, and Hawaiian.
"See I him" is grammatically correct in these languages.
 VOS languages include Fijian and Malagasy. "See him I."
 OVS languages include Hixkaryana. "Him see I."
 OSV languages include Xavante and Warao. "Him I see."

Sometimes patterns are more complex: German, Dutch and Frisian have SOV in subordinates,
but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the
guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.

Others, such as Latin, Romanian and Finnish, have no strict word order; rather, the sentence
structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. Nonetheless, there is
often a preferred order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO
is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument
roles. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have
both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in
transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses.[citation needed] Cases like
this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with the symbol
'S' being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and 'A' for the actor/agent of a
transitive clause. ('O' for object may be replaced with 'P' for 'patient' as well.) Thus Russian is
fixed AVO but flexible SV/VS. Such an approach allows the description of word order to be
more easily extended to languages which do not meet the criteria in the preceding section. For
example, the Mayan languages have been described with the rather uncommon VOS word order.
However, they are ergative–absolutive languages, and the more specific word order is
intransitive VS, transitive VOA, where S and O are grammatically equivalent. Indeed, many
languages claimed to have a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan.

[edit] Functions of constituent word order

A fixed or prototypical word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence
semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to
ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments
and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method
is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another
marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load
in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict
morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian.[1]

Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to
precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are
more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges
being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the
sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the
sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the
subject.

The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word
order patterns: An overwhelming majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and
V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V however, has been shown to be a very telling
difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.[7]

Knowledge of word order on the other hand can be applied to identify the thematic relations of
the NPs in a clause of an unfamiliar language. If we can identify the verb in a clause, and we
know that the language is strict accusative SVO, then we know that Grob smock Blug probably
means that Grob is the smocker and Blug the entity smocked. However, since very strict word
order is rare in practice, such applications of word order studies are rarely effective.[citation needed]

[edit] Phrase word orders and branching

Main articles: Branching (linguistics) and Head directionality parameter

The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause.
Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase,
one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before or after the head noun.

 adjective (red house vs house red)

 determiner (this house vs house this)
 numeral (two houses vs houses two)
 possessor (my house vs house my)
 relative clause (the by me built house vs the house built by me)

Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions
(in London), postpositions (London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both
sides).

There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level
constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use
postpositions. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For
SVO languages, either order is common.

For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives
after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their
heads (une grande voiture). On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always
go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common
(greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after their heads, such
as "extraordinaire", which kept its position when it was borrowed from French.)