1 [Published in Marina Chini (ed.), 2010, Topic, struttura dell'informa- zione e acquisizione linguistica, Franco Angeli, Milano, pp. 35-58.] Cognitive categories behind early Topic/Comment structures Valentina Bambini, Jacopo Torregrossa * 0. Overview of the study The idea that early productions are structured according to topic/comment configurations has often been held across the literature on child language ac- quisition. The present paper addresses three main lines of investigation: a) finding empirical support in favor of the above mentioned idea, overcoming the vagueness of the existing literature; b) proposing definitions of topic and comment able to account for the cognitive factors underlying the structuring of utterances according to informational criteria; c) understanding how child- ren make indeed use of topic and comment for the purpose of communication. To these aims, we set up a multi-layered analysis of early two-word combina- tions, teasing apart the most relevant cognitive factors that come into play when producing topic/comment structures. Our preliminary data suggest that on the one hand topics emerge as clusters of basic lexical, thematic and se- mantic categories, tending to be nouns or pronouns referring to entity or agents which are concrete and accessible in the extra-linguistic context. On the other hand, comment units cluster around a specific linguistic function, i.e., a characterizing function, encoded by a vast array of lexical and semantic features. We also suggest that children do exploit topic/comment structures to express predication, being still unequipped with syntactic tools, i.e., sub- ject/predicate structures. These results may shed new light both on child lan- * We are deeply in debt to Pier Marco Bertinetto, Alessandro Lenci, Melissa Bowerman and Denis Delfitto for helpful suggestions during the development of the exploratory corpus analy- sis presented here. The permission accorded by Fondazione Stella Maris in Calambrone (Pisa) to examine the video recordings of the CHILDES corpus is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank Marina Chini for allowing us to benefit from discussions with the participants of the Pa- via Workshop.