The functionalist approach to syntactic structure (Bates & MacWhinney, 1980;
MacWhinney, 1977; Rommetveit, 1974) assigns a central role to the topic-comment
distinction in both production and comprehension. According to the functionalist approach,
the speaker's role in communication involves him in a process of point-making
(MacWhinney, 1980). In this process, the speaker first informs the listener that there is
some topic he wants to talk about. This topic must be specified in sufficient detail so that it
may be uniquely identified by the listener. Having selected and specified the topic, the
speaker then proceeds to make some point about the topic. In most cases, the point that he
makes contains some new information that then functions as a comment about the topic.
Thus the various activities of topic-selection, topic-specification, comment-selection, and
comment-specification can be viewed as pieces of a single unified process which has as its
goal the making of points.