I was struck by this tweet from Lynne Murphy today: For those who don’t know, Lynne is an American linguist who lives in England and teaches at the University of Sussex, and blogs regularly about differences between British and American varieties of English.

Today I was walking with my son, and we passed two men going the other way. I said to him, “Did you see how one of those guys was really red in the face?” “No, what’s so special about them being red in the face?” “I think he was drunk. Sometimes when people get really drunk, their faces get red that way. Not every red face means the person is drunk;

There were a couple of years when I was tremendously confused about pragmatics and information structure. I learned a lot from reading Knud Lambrecht’s 1994 book Information Structure and Sentence Form . And one of the most useful things I learned was that people use the word “topic” to mean several different things, some of which are mutually exclusive.