Trying (and failing) to connect the dots: topic, comment, news, point of departure, theme, rheme

[pauamma]

I was wondering about the differences, if any, about the concepts of topic and comment (which IIRC are what Japanese and ASL, among others, use in that order) and those of news and point of departure (which the Tagalog learning website I'm using says Tagalog uses in that order, although it also mentions they're sometimes called comment and topic), and while DDGing for clues I came across theme and rheme, and now I'm very confused because I have 3 sets of concepts to puzzle out instead of 2 and I'm not any closer to an answer to my initial question. Help?

ETA1: https://learningtagalog.com/articles/tagalog_focus.html says news and point of departure match comment and topic as linguists use them, but not as the general public would (which I can accept, for all that it confused me). Still trying to understand how topic and comment differ from theme and rheme.

Comments

[steorra]

I believe I've heard the Tagalog categories referred to as topic and comment, similarly to Japanese. But I don't have a source at hand, and could be misremembering. It just seems like something I heard somewhere in a linguistics class at some point.

[pauamma]

Ah, finally found it. https://learningtagalog.com/articles/tagalog_focus.html says their reason for not using comment and topic (which would fit in their linguistics meanings) is that those terms have different meanings for non-linguists (discourse-level vs. sentence-level). This clears my initial confusion but doesn't help with the topic-comment vs. theme-rheme distinction.