The purpose of the paper is to sort out the cognitive considerations involved in the phenomena described with the labels theme, emphasis, focus and the ones mentioned in the title. C. attempts to account for the phenomena by speaking of the various 'statuses' a noun may have. The statuses under consideration (unlike, e.g., a noun's case status) are independent of the content of utterances, but they have to do with the way in which the content is transmitted: they have to do with the speaker's assessment of how the addressee is able to process what he is saying against the background of a certain context.