This sentence includes two topics marked by the non-manual marker ‘t’ and separated from each other and from the main clause by a slight pause (as indicated by the commas). In fact, the clause following the topics ( index _3a prefer artichoke ) is a complete and well-formed sentence on its own. The first topic is identical to (or co-referential with) the subject of the sentence, that is, the second index refers back to the subject john. The second topic also bears a relation with an argument within the is following clause, but this relation is of a different nature, as the topic vegetable is semantically superordinate to the clause-internal object artichoke (see Section 8.6 for semantic relations).

The structure of the sentence is: Topic(Subj) – Topic(Obj) – S – V – O.