Linguaphiles

Using the illative where ("Saan tumae ang pusa?") in "where did the cat poop?", effectively asking where the poop went, not where the cat was.

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.

It occurred to me during tonight's Tagalog vocabulary drill that umaga (morning) and maaga (early) may both come from the same root aga, one using the aspect prefix/infix "um", the other using the adjective/stative verb prefix "ma". The online Tagalog dictionary I use confirms that aga is a word meaning earliness.