Pre-posing to the Beginning of the Sentence: Topicalization or Focalization?

Constituent ‘movement’ and its reasons have been appealing to linguists for ages. Some believe that preposing is made to topicalize an element, whereas some believe that preposing is made in order to focalize that element. For this purpose, linguists have come up with and introduced a bunch of terms in their terminology. These coined and somehow contrasting/overlapping terms including topic, theme, subject, comment, predicate, contrast, focus, and so on and so forth have confused and put the new generation of linguists in dilemma while dealing with the above-mentioned terms. Meticulously speaking, what is topic? What does topicalization mean? What about focus and focalization? How are they defined? On the basis of some Persian film scripts, and analyzing 122 sentences, this research aimed at investigating the focus marker ‘ke’ in terms of information structure. Results showed that focalization in Persian occurs ‘in situ’ and any movement to the beginning of the sentence is just for topicalization.