Abstract
<jats:p>Discourse functions such as topic or focus are syntactically encoded by word order in many languages. Aside from the topic‐before‐comment pattern, many languages develop a pattern where constituents bearing a discourse function are clustered to the beginning of the clause. Verb final languages tend to encode topic and focus in the first way; the second strategy is often found in languages with verb‐medial syntax, where the verb divides the discourse‐functionally marked part from the remainder of the clause. Counteracting this is the concept of subject, which bears some intrinsic relationship to the notion of topic. Common development lines are shown on the example of Germanic languages (German and English), and Romance languages including Latin, Hungarian, and Chinese. The encoding of these discourse functions is partly connected with sentence typing, so a short section on the development of sentence type systems in the Indo‐European languages and Hungarian is provided.</jats:p>