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Editorial Board:
Alton Becker (Michigan) Paul Hopper (Binghamton)
Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Margaret Langdon (San Diego)
Bernard Comrie (Los Angeles) Charles Li (Santa Barbara)
Scott DeLancey (Oregon) Johanna Nichols (Berkeley)
Gerard Diffloth (Chicago) Andrew Pawley (Auckland)
R.M.W.Dixon (Canberra) Frans Plank (Konstanz)
John Haiman (Winnipeg) Gillian Sankoff (Philadelphia)
Kenneth Hale (Cambridge, Mass.) Dan Slobin (Berkeley)
Bernd Heine (Köln) Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara)
Volume 14
PERSPECTIVES ON TOPICALIZATION
THE CASE OF JAPANESE 'WA'
PERSPECTIVES ON TOPICALIZATION
THE CASE OF JAPANESE WA
edited by
JOHN HINDS
SENKO K. MAYNARD
and
SHOICHIWASAKI
1987
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Perspectives on topicalization.
(Typological studies in language, ISSN 0167-7373; v. 14)
Includes bibliographies.
1. Wa (The Japanese word) I. Hinds, John. II. Maynard, Senko K. III. Iwasaki, Shoichi.
IV. Series.
PL669.W3P47 1987 495.6'2 87-29982
ISBN 90-272-2885-X (hb.)/90-272-2886-8 (pb.) (European; alk. paper)
ISBN 0-915027-97-6 (hb.)/0-915027-98-4 (pb.) (U.S.; alk. paper)
© Copyright 1987 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
ABBREVIATIONS 307
PREFACE
The Japanese topic marker wa has been the research focus of many
scholars both in Japan and overseas. In Japan, Kokugogaku (National Lan
guage Studies) scholars have identified wa by a variety of terms, among
which kakarijoshi is perhaps one of the most widely used. Different charac
terizations of wa have been proposed in association with various functions
as well. For example, wa serves the function of tsuite setsumei suru kotogara
o toritatete yuu "mentioning the items to be explained" and kyoochoosuru
"emphasizing" in Yamazaki (1965). Wa appears in handanbun "sentences of
judgments" according to Nagano (1972) and wa expresses fuhensei "univer
sal phenomenon" as suggested by Miura (1976).
It is through the work of Mikami (1960, 1972) and Kuno (1972, 1973)
however, that the study of wa has become the focus of many scholars
abroad. Mikami characterizes wa as teidai no wa "theme-presenting wa" in
the context of dai-jutsu kankei "theme-predicate correspondence." Mikami
also explores the function of wa across clause and sentence boundaries and
identifies such phenomena as konma-goe "comma crossing" and piriodo-
goe "period crossing." Kuno's study of wa as a theme marker has intro
duced terms now widely used, such as "anaphoric wa," "wa for generic
NPs" and "NPs of unique reference." These terms characterize "thematic
wa" as opposed to "contrastive wa" and both of these are in contrast to
noun phrases marked by ga in discourse. Both Mikami's and Kuno's works
have influenced almost all subsequent studies of wa abroad as well as in
Japan. Today we find studies of wa within the framework of various
theories and methods in linguistics and related disciplines, some of which
have been developed only recently.
This volume suggests that various approaches to the topic marker wa
are not only possible but are beneficial. We do not expect to have the ulti
mate answer to persisting questions surrounding wa; rather, we wish to con
tinue our efforts to explore different pathways and different research
methods based on different philosophical standpoints with the hope that
each perspective will shed additional light on different aspects of Japanese
topicalization. Naturally, this volume offers only some possible approaches.
Vlll PREFACE
ity" (Prince 1981), "syntactic binding" which realizes the preferred topic-
comment structure, "staging" (Maynard 1980, and in this volume) and
rhetorical organization where discourse connection (particularly in the ten
of the ki-shoo-ten-ketsu organizational principle of Japanese) is
accomplished by thematization.
In his effort to identify the discourse function of wa in oral expository
discourse, Iwasaki focuses on two related issues, the pragmatic status of a
wa-marked noun phrase and the functions of these noun phrases in dis
course. Based on oral descriptions of living quarter layouts, Iwasaki prop
oses that "identifiability" characterizes wa-marked noun phrases more
accurately than the often cited "anaphoric" or "generic" category. Addi
tionally, Iwasaki proposes that the primary discourse function of wa is
"scope-setting," and he adds three derivative functions as well; providing
"multiple predications," indicating "negative scope" and "contrastive ele
ment" in its discourse context.
Within the framework of his earlier distinction between "categorical"
and "thetic" judgment (Kuroda 1972) — but with a new interpretation —,
Kuroda explores the discourse properties of wa in literature, namely in pas
sages from Tolstoi, Lawrence and Faulkner in Japanese translation. Specifi
cally, Kuroda's interest lies in wa/ga markings of noun phrases that are sub
jects of quotative verbs. His inquiry addresses the literary functions of
wa/ga markings from the perspective of narrative point of view.
In Part 2, grammatical and functional characteristics of wa are revealed
in relation to other syntactic phenomena, namely negation and WH-wa
questions. In the first paper, McGloin's interest lies in the role that wa plays
in aspects of negation. McGloin characterizes negation with ga (as well as
other non-wa marked negation) as "speaker-motivated" since it often rep
resents a negative statement contrary to common belief. On the other
hand, negation with wa in general negates matter-of-factly, and is referred
to as "discourse-motivated" negation. Furthermore, by incorporating the
contrastive/thematic characterization of wa, McGloin proposes that the
primary function of wa is to determine the scope of negation in Japanese. In
the second paper, Miyagawa proposes the most fundamental property of wa
as being "set-anaphoric" on the basis of evidence observed in WH-wa ques
tions in Japanese. After identifying ga as a "creator of sets" in contrast to
wa, Miyagawa attempts to characterize various functions of wa and ga
catalogued by Kuno by applying these two broader concepts.
Part 3 contains two diachronic studies of wa. In the first paper Ueno
χ PREFACE
REFERENCES
PATRICIA M. CLANCY
and
PAMELA DOWNING
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
as autonomous.
The scope of the cohesive bond effected by wa of course varies consid
erably from use to use. A very global exploitation of wďs cohesive power
can be seen in cases where it serves to set up a thematic framework which
persists for the duration of the text in which it appears. In cases where it is
used merely to mark a contrast between elements in adjacent clauses, on
the other hand, the scope of the cohesive bond is extremely local. Although
many cases fall on the continuum which stretches between these extremes,
and although some uses of wa can be seen as working in the interests of
global and local cohesion simultaneously, we have found the local — global
distinction to be a useful one for our analysis, and we have used it as a
means of organizing the discussion which follows. Our primary finding is
that the majority of the was in our narratives can be characterized as locally
motivated; globally motivated thematic was appear quite infrequently by
comparison. This finding is somewhat surprising, given the emphasis on the
thematic function of wa in previous studies; in our conclusions, we specu
late that the preponderance of locally motivated was in our data may be
linked to the fact that the texts we are examining are oral rather than writ
ten.
The data for our study came from three collections of oral narratives
elicited from native speakers of Japanese in Tokyo. The first collection
includes 17 narratives based on the "Pear film" (cf. Chafe 1980), a 7-minute
color film with live actors but no dialogue, which was used in a crosslinguis-
tic project on the verbalization of remembered experience. The film was
shown to groups of female university students, who then individually
recounted the plot of the story to a female interviewer. The other two data
collections were elicited from five male and five female university students,
as part of a larger study of the development of narrative structure in
Japanese (Clancy 1980b). For this project each subject was interviewed
individually by two female interviewers, an "elicitor" and a "listener." First
the elicitor showed the subject, one by one, a series of seven hand-drawn
cartoon strips of from five to eight frames each, depicting brief stories
involving four young children. After looking at a strip once, the subject told
the story to the listener while looking at the pictures. Two of these cartoons
are printed in Appendix A. Next, the listener left the room and the elicitor
showed the subject a 7-minute videotape from the popular television car
toon series Sazaesan. The listener then returned and asked the subject to
tell her the story. To help the reader follow our discussion of these narra-
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 5
of the theme with an explicit NP-wa reference after a certain interval, often
the beginning of a new paragraph. Thus both Hinds & Hinds and Maynard
take the basic progression to be NP-ga --> NP~wa --> 0 , with wa-marking
preceding the use of ellipsis.
In this section we will examine the typical progression of referential
forms and ννα-marking in participant introductions in our data. For this
analysis we will consider all first mentions of story characters, but only
those second mentions which do not follow an intervening reference to a
different character in subject position, since switch reference is a powerful
factor restricting referential choice, often preventing the use of ellipsis in
Japanese (cf. Clancy 1980a). Only the first two, rather than the first three,
mentions of a referent will be included, since it was rare, especially in the
cartoon data, to find three consecutive mentions of the same referent with
out interference.
Table 1 presents our findings on referential progression for the intro
duction of new story characters in our three data samples.
As the table shows, by far the most frequent sequence (63.8% on the
average) for introductions in each sample was NP-ga --> 0 . An example of
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 7
central figure's perspective and to treat him as theme (wa) and the others as
non-theme (ga)." These analyses of the thematic function of wa quite
clearly place it, then, among the inventory of devices available to the
speaker who wishes to manipulate and clarify the global structure of the
narrative being created.
Although this analysis of wa apparently corresponds to native speak
ers' intuitions, the only evidence in these studies that a particular referent
was, in fact, the theme was whether or not it received wa-marking. In this
paper we have decided, following Iwasaki's (1984) suggestion, to "observe
first what wa is doing in discourse" and then to "ask if this function corre
lates with a notion of 'topic/theme' which can be independently con
structed." Accordingly, to avoid circularity, we have sought a definition of
"main character" which does not rely upon wa; presumably, there are other
linguistic and non-linguistic expressions of this status.
For our analysis, we decided on three measures of thematicity or
character importance/prominence/centrality. First, a non-linguistic mea
sure, available for the cartoon strip data only, is the number of frames in
which a particular character appears, and the number in which s/he appears
alone. These cartoons were deliberately constructed to have characters with
varying degrees of importance and of interference from other, secondary
characters, and it seemed to us that the most prominent characters in the
input could be seen as central to the plots in which they participated. Our
other two measures were linguistic: the persistence of a story character fol
lowing a mention with NP-wa, and the occurrence of zero switch reference
to a character in a coreferential chain initiated by NP-wa. These linguistic
measures will be discussed in more detail following a consideration of the
results of our non-linguistic measure.
(47)
In the Sazaesan stories, for example, the primary instigator of the action is
clearly Ikura, but he was marked by wa less frequently than Wakame and
12 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PA MELA DOWNING
Katsuo, who were tormented by his mischief. And Ikura's mother, who
appears only sporadically in the story, was marked by wa about as fre
quently as Ikura. In the Pear narratives, wa-marking similarly occurred not
only on the important characters, such as the bike boy and the threesome,
but also on minor characters, such as the goat man, who was deliberately
included in the film to observe how narrators would deal with a completely
irrelevant character.
In summary, there was a tendency for wa to occur more frequently on
characters having an important role in the overall storyline, especially in
the cartoon narratives, which had more telescoped plots. But wa-marking
occurred frequently enough on minor characters to indicate that a more
local motivation must underlie much of the wa-marking that occurred in
our data. We will take up in detail the nature of these local motivations for
wa-marking in Section II below.
Next, let us turn to our linguistic measures of hero status. By consider
ing these measures, we hope to avoid the creeping circularity of our non-
linguistic criterion: the more frequently a character appeared in the car
toons, the more frequently it was mentioned, allowing more opportunities
for wa-marking. We also hope to avoid a purely subjective definition of
theme (on the analyst's part), while allowing for subjectivity in the way the
narrator chooses to present and inter-relate the characters in the story. Our
linguistic measures are based on the assumption that selection of a particu
lar character as overall or even temporary theme will have linguistic
reflexes other than wa-marking which can provide independent verification
or refutation of claims regarding the correlation between the use of wa and
thematic status. For our analysis we have chosen two linguistic measures
that have been applied cross-linguistically in other studies of referential
choice. Both measures are local in that they focus on ellipsis chains, which
in our data typically did not continue for very long. Thus the measures can
capture cases in which both story heroes and characters of temporary
importance are treated as thematic.
however, show a striking departure from this pattern, with NP-wa introduc
ing referents that continue to figure in the immediately following narration
more frequently than NP-ga. Except for this single finding, however, the
persistence data provides little support for the claim that wa marks the main
or thematic character.
To investigate in more detail the relationship between persistence and
wα-marking, and especially the pattern shown on Table 4 for the Sazaesan
stories, we have calculated separately for each referent in the narratives the
relative persistence when that character was mentioned with NP-wa vs. NP-
ga. Table 5 presents the results of this analysis.
Looking first at the cartoon data, we can see from Table 5 that in the
two cartoons with a single important character (Bike Accident and Onigiri),
reference with NP-ga initiated much longer chains of coreferential ellipsis
and a higher percentage of references that persisted at all than did refer
ences with NP-wa. This is because in relating these cartoons, narrators usu
ally followed the typical ga —> 0 progression in introducing the heroes, who
then appeared alone in many successive frames, resulting in high persis
tence figures. Hamada (1983), who also found the progression ga --> 0 in
referent introductions, notes that "if a sentence containing NP-ga precedes
ellipsis, whether the unexpressed referent is theme or not has to be estab
lished on other grounds." In these cartoon stories the main characters were
presumably identified as such without benefit of wα-marking, by overall fre
quency of mention, for example, (cf. Givón 1983), and by the nature of the
plot. Sometimes an introductory formula also served this function, only to
be followed by ga-marking on the hero, as in the following:
(3) ... de taroo ... tarookun hito-ri no ohanashi ne. ...
and Taroo Tarookun 1-CL (person) LK story EX
eto ne, ... tarookun ga, sakki wa sanrinsha datta
uh EX Taroo SB before TP tricycle COP:PST
n da kedo,
NOM COP but
And Taroo it's a story about just Taroo. And Taroo had a tricy
cle before, but ...
Of course, no one has ever claimed that narrators must mark the main
character with wa. But upon reflection, one wonders exactly what wa-mark-
ing with a purely thematic function would contribute to stories other than
those having more than one important character. In such stories, the lis
tener could be left in doubt as to which character the narrator perceived as
primary, as in certain of the stories Maynard analyzed. Perhaps wa need
not be used to mark the main character unless there is a rather large
16 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
case that narrators assume the most important character to be easily identi
fiable, and therefore treat it as "given information" with attenuated men
tion (cf. Chafe 1976) even when there is potential competition from other
characters "on stage." In fact, main characters do tend to be mentioned
with attentuated forms even in contexts such as switch reference, which
usually elicit more explicit referential forms (cf. Hinds & Hinds 1979;
Clancy 1980a). If wa functions to establish a story participant as thematic,
then we can predict that NP-wa mentions will be more likely than NF-ga
mentions to initiate coreferential chains that will persist even across men
tions (in subject position) of other characters. Since elliptical switch refer
ence is not very frequent, this is an extremely stringent measure of a refe
rent's status as the main or thematic character. However, there is some evi-
dence for the validity of this measure; Hamada (1983), who found cases in
which a central character received elliptical mention following intervention
by a peripheral character, reports that this occurred only when the central
character had already been established with NP-wa before the elliptical
switch reference.
To test the prediction that elliptical switch reference is more common
for main characters established as such with wa-marking, we examined
every case in which a coreferential chain of subjects initiated by NP-wa was
interrupted by a reference in subject position to a different character, fol
lowed by a zero switch reference upon returning to the character in the wa
initiated chain. For comparison, we also examined cases of zero switch ref
erence to characters following ga-initiated chains. 4 Table 6 presents our
findings.
In the cartoon data, 60.8% of all elliptical switch references occurred
on referents whose last nominal mention was with NP-ga. Zero switch ref
erence occurred much more frequently on main characters in the cartoons
as identified by our non-linguistic measure. However, elliptical switch ref
erence was clearly more frequent following NP-ga than NP-wa mentions. A
typical example of elliptical switch reference in an NP-ga-initiated chain of
ellipsis is the following:
(4) ... de yukichan ga, daidokoro no naka de
and Yuki SB kitchen LK middle in
issshookenmei, onigiri tsukutteimasu. ...de kondo
busily onigiri DO is-making and this time
kore ... — ... iremono ni tsumemashite ne, ... de, ..
this DO sort-of container LC pack:GER EX and
dekakete iku wake desu. ... dekake te iku wake desu.
go-out:GER go NOM COP go-out:GER go NOM COP
... de onigiri o tor- ... toridashite, ... hoobari-
and onigiri DO ta- take out:GERcram-into-mouth-
nagara ... kooen ni ikimasu. ...de kooen ni wa, ...
while park to go and park at TP
hiroshikun to ... satchan ga imashite, ...de
Hiroshi and Sachi SB be:GER and this
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 19
2) Reversion from Wa to Ga
In some cases, a story character may simply lose its thematic status.
The clearest indication of this loss is a reversion to ga-marking for a for
merly wa-marked referent, although disappearance from the storyline or
appearance only in oblique positions may also reflect such a loss. In our
data we found 20 cases in which a formerly wa-marked referent appeared
with ga, although no other character had been marked by wa in the interim.
These cases fell into two basic types: those in which a clear motivation for
ga-marking was apparent, and those in which wa-marking was lost either at
a discourse boundary or for no obvious reason. In the latter cases it would
appear that the original wa just didn't "take" for more than an extremely
limited bit of narration.
Among the cases in which the loss of thematic status was motivated by
a specific reason for using ga, the majority occurred in embedded or subor
dinated clauses. It is well-known that in Japanese, thematic wa-marking
does not occur in embedded clauses (cf. Kuno 1973). The other specific
motivation for a shift to ga in our data was the narrator's decision to mark
a referent with "exhaustive listing" ga (cf. Kuno 1973). In 6), for example,
the narrator initially marked the referent with wa, but then, following a dig
ression hesitating over who performed the action, shifted to 'exhaustive list
ing' ga to emphasize which of the two referents was in fact the actor.
(6) hiroshikun wa ne, ... boku wa ne, ... wanpaku a!
Hiroshi TP EX I TP EX naughty ah!
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 23
D. Conclusions on Thematic Wa
Having examined a number of linguistic and non-linguistic concomit
ants of thematic status in narrative and their correlation with the wa-mark-
ing patterns shown in our data, we are ready to address the fundamental
question, "Does wα mark thematic status of participants in oral narra
tives?" As we have seen, the results of our analysis are somewhat mixed,
but the general conclusion would seem to be that wa-marking is not neces
sary to establish thematic status, nor does wa-marking, when it appears,
necessarily indicate that the participant in question is thematic, to the extent
that thematicity can be equated with the measures that we have considered,
i.e., frequency of appearance, persistence, or ability to elicit zero switch
reference. Coupled with the evidence from cases where speakers revert
from wa-marking to ga-marking for no apparent reason, these findings
suggest that many cases of wα-marking may be due to extremely local moti
vations unrelated to the narrator's desire to elevate a particular character to
the role of thematic participant.
One might, of course, object that these conclusions are overly pes
simistic, since they are based in some cases on the assumption that a thema
tic participant will function as such for an extended section of text. Our per
sistence measure, for example, attempts to correlate wa-marking and the
subsequent behavior of the referent of the wa-marked noun phrase; we
would not necessarily expect to find any such correlation if we assumed that
wa could mark sentence-level themes as well as higher level (paragraph or
text level) themes. Ueno (this volume), for instance, takes the view that wa
can mark themes at all three of these different levels. Given an assumption
of this sort, it might be argued that if the theme in question is merely a sen
tence-level one, we cannot expect to discover the other reflexes of thema
ticity that we have considered, since they are associated only with the
thematic participants in larger segments of text.
Such an interpretation is in principle consonant with our data; how
ever, in the face of our negative findings with respect to the correlation
between wα-marking and discourse-level themes, we are reluctant to adopt
such an account without some independent means of verifying the thematic
ity of a wa-marked participant at the sentence level. And it is not clear to us
how this can be done. Consider example (8).
(8) yukichan no mama to, ... satchan no mama ga odekake
Yuki GN mama and Sachi GN mama SB going-out
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 25
This sentence represents an explicit contrast between the fact that many
people came to the party and the fact that none of them were interesting.
Kuno has argued that the was that appear here are "contrastive", as
opposed to "thematic;" this dichotomy has been widely accepted, and
numerous attempts have been made to describe the contexts in which wa
will carry the contrastive interpretation. Kuno has tried to to link the possi
bility of a contrastive interpretation to the informational status of the wa-
marked NP, claiming that wa-marked NPs which are neither anaphoric nor
generic can only be interpreted as contrastive. A somewhat different
approach is taken by Maynard (1980), who stresses the importance of con
text and proposes that the contrastive effect arises when the NP-wa is
embedded in a context where other alternatives (i.e., the other pole(s) of
the contrastive relation) are identifiable. Virtually all researchers have
argued that contrastive uses are identifiable on the basis of a special "con
trastive" stress pattern, in which the wa-marked NP receives heavy stress.
These claims are relevant here, of course, because they suggest a
means of accounting for the numerous uses of wa in our data which do not
appear to be thematic at the discourse level. Many of our examples do in
fact seem to conform to standard descriptions of contrastive wa, exhibiting
a semantic contrast between a participant or a situation denoted by nearby
(local) linguistic elements. A characteristic example of this sort of wa usage
appears in (10).
(10) de okaasan wa.. wa ne, ... monosugoku ... sono
and mother TP TP EX very-much that
ikurachan no... itte iru koto wakaru n desu
Ikura SB saying is thing understand NOM COP
tte ne, ... hoka no kodomotachi wa, zenzen
QT EX other LK child-PL TP completely
wakannai.
don't-understand
And the mother says she understands very well what Ikura is say
ing; the other children don't understand at all.
Here the mother's ability to understand the speech of her child Ikura is
being contrasted with the inability of the others to understand, and both the
mother and the others carry was that can be characterized as "contrastive".
In this section of the paper we will examine the conditions under which
28 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
the opposition are explicitly expressed. The effect will also be enhanced if
both participants enjoy roughly equal thematic status; an inherently con
trastive relation between a hero and a relatively unimportant participant
may in fact be treated as a matter of foreground and background activity,
receiving very different linguistic treatment than it would if both partici
pants were considered to be on a par and equally present in the foreground.
The presence of a relation of the appropriate sort between the participants
in the opposition emerges most clearly when the speaker chooses parallel
labels for them, denoting one as kodomo 'child' and the other as otona
'adulť, for example, or referring to one as X no hoo (literally, 'X's side')
and the other as Y no hoo 'Y's side'.
The nature of the dimension along which the participants in the oppos
ition are seen to differ will also be of importance. The clearest cases of
incompatibility are, of course, associated with lexical antonyms or negative-
positive verb pairs of the sort illustrated in (9) and (10), but our data also
contained numerous examples of pairs that could be seen as representing
complementary activities, such as kiku 'ask' and iu 'say', or which involved
identical verbs but different complements or adverbial modifiers, e.g.,
sakki 'before' vs. kondo 'this time', or nashi o ageru 'give pears' vs. booshi
o ageru 'give a hať. Context must also be taken into consideration;
although 'walk by' and 'be surprised' would presumably not be analyzed as
semantically complementary lexical items, pairs of precisely this sort were
frequently involved in the locally contrastive wa uses in our data, because
they did constitute complementary actions in the situations our narrators
were describing, as in the Pear film, when the threesome walk by the pear
man at the end of the story, and he reacts with surprise.
Among the various materials which we presented to our subjects, it
was those which could be described in terms that combined the three fac
tors just discussed that were the most successful in eliciting descriptions
containing locally contrastive was. Particularly striking were the responses
to several of the cartoon strips with joint heroes, where each character per
formed actions that could be seen as parallel to or in response to those of
the other. All of our subjects, for example, used was in describing the
actions of the two small boys depicted in the Sand Fight cartoon, where
each destroyed the work of the other. Eight of the ten subjects used wa for
mentions of both boys; two used wa on only one of the two participants.
The description in (11) is typical of those we elicited in response to this car
toon.
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 31
rators who described this cartoon, she does it in a way which continues to
emphasize the parallels between them and their activities, in this case by
using not only the two was, but also parallel forms of reference
{Tarookun no hoo vs. Hiroshikun no hoo) and identical verbs, i.e., asobu
'play'. Because the speaker has chosen this method of description, neither
of the characters emerges as central at the expense of the other, and
because the text in which the N P - W A mentions occur exhibits all three of the
traits mentioned above, both was lend themselves to very robust contrastive
interpretations. 8
It is of interest to note that many of the uses of wa to describe parallel
activities are preceded by precisely the sort of frame-establishing introduc
tion shown in (11). In many cases, as in (11), the participants in question
are identified as members of the same semantic category, e.g., first graders,
and are assigned as a group to the same temporal and spatial locale. Scene-
setting descriptions of these sorts are highly effective in predisposing the lis
tener to assign a locally contrastive interpretation to subsequent wa-m-
ing on characters because they set up a limited pool of participants of co
equal status, so that when one member of the pool is subsequently singled
out for attention, we are left wondering what has become of the other
unmentioned members. 9
A similar effect can be achieved without devoting a section of the text
to scene-setting simply by evoking, by means of some lexical item, a frame
which by necessity involves the participation of more than one character.
Without explicitly mentioning each individual member, for example, the
narrator could with the mention of a family evoke the existence of a
mother, father, etc., subsequently referring to the activities of each with
wa, to contrastive effect. Similarly, as the example in (12) illustrates, the
use of a certain predicate may entail the existence of several participants.
(12) Yoonashi sono ko-tachi ni, san-і ni
pears DO those child-PL IO 3-CL(person) IO
hito-tsu zutsu ageru wake desu ne. de sorede,
one-CL(inanimate) each give NOM COP EX and then
ano-- sono ko-tachi wa, ano moratte koo ..
uh those child-PL TP uh receive:GER uh
yorokonde kaeru n desu keredomo,
be-glad:GER return NOM COP but
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 33
A. Parallel Activities/States
Almost half of the locally contrastive was in our sample (108 of 225
(48%)) appear in contexts where the speaker is enumerating the parallel
activities or states of two participants, most often of equal thematic status.
The example in (11) above, in which the speaker describes the parallel
activities of Hiroshi and Taroo in the sandbox, is typical of this usage.
As shown in Table 8, virtually all of the uses of this pattern involve wa-
34 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
the same way. In the description shown in (15), for example, mention of
Yuki and Sachi is marked by what appears to be a locally motivated wa of
this sort; the last preceding NP had referred to the girls and there was thus
no need to re-establish their identity with an explicit NP at this point in the
narrative.
(15) yukichan to satchan wa... atama ga yokute, ...
Yuki and Sachi TP head SB good:GER
kasa , ... jibun-tachi no .. yukidaruma ni
umbrella DO self-PL GN snowman to
sashite-oite agemashita. ... ame ga futtekitara, ...
thrust-put-GER gave rain SB begin-to-fall-when
yukichan to, satchan no yukidaruma wa, ... kichinto
Yuki and Sachi GN snowman TP nicely
shiteita kedo, ... ijiwaru o shita tarookun no
was-done but teasing DO did Taroo GN
yukidaruma wa, .. kowar ete-shimaimashita.
snowman TP be-destroyed-end-up:PST
Yuki and Sachi were smart, and stuck an umbrella on their snow
man. When it began to rain, Yuki and Sachi's snowman was fine
but the snowman of Taroo, who had been nasty, ended up get
ting ruined.
Uses of this sort can thus be seen as a variant on the parallel activity type
construction, since the context is strong enough to engender a locally con
trastive (parallel activity) implication even in the absence of an explicit
mention of the half of the opposition.
B. Action/State Reaction
In the second pattern that occurs frequently in our data, wa-marking
occurs on only the second member of the opposition. This pattern typically
occurs when the speaker is developing a plot sequence containing succes
sive activities involving different participants. Most commonly, the A
member of the pair denotes an activity on the part of X to which Y then
reacts, or fails to react, in the part of the pair. The example shown in (16)
is typical.
38 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
tain a chain of was of this type, since the actions of each participant can be
seen as being produced in response to those of the preceding participant. In
such cases, the A member of the opposition contains a wa which marks its
status as a response to the event that preceded it, and the member con
tains a wa to mark its opposition to A. This often happens when speakers
are recounting conversations, in which each speech turn occurs in response
to the preceding one, as in (18). Here the participant in the response, i.e.,
the teacher, is a minor character in the overall plot, making it difficult to
interpret the wa which it bears as thematic.
(18) ... ni natte, ... soshitara sensei ga yattekite
fight RS become:GER then teacher SB come:GER
... futa-ri shikarimashita. ...de
2-CL(person) DO scolded and
hiroshikun wa... "a! tarookun ga yatta n da yo"
Hiroshi TP A! Taroo SB did NOM COP EX
tte itte, ... iitsukeguchi o shita n da kedomo, ...
QT say:GER tattling DO did NOM COP but
sensei wa, "futa-ri tomo warui n desu yo" tte,
teacher TP 2-CL(person) both bad NOM COP EX QT
... de, ... "futa-ri wa nakayoku ... oyama o
and 2-CL(person) TP nicely mountain DO
tsukurinasai" to itte, ... riari isshoni asobasemashita.
make:IMP QT say:GER forced together play-CAU-PST
(they) started fighting, and then a teacher came, and scolded the
two of them. And Hiroshi tattled and said, "Taroo did it", but
the teacher made them play together, saying, "Both of you are
bad; make a mountain together nicely".
As in uses of the parallel activity/state pattern described above, the speaker
may choose to reinforce the bond between the two activities by using
adverbs or causal or adversative conjunctions as the kara 'because' in (18).
Action/state-reactions are, however, typically not preceded by any intro
ductory passage in which a pool of participants is introduced; the impetus
for the use of wa seems to arise more from a desire to link the series of
events being described than to exhaustively enumerate the activities of the
participants who are involved. The frame which unites the participants is in
40 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
fact usually evoked by the predicate in the A half of the opposition, rather
than by the use of some advance framing device. Thus the predicate iu 'say'
in the A half of example (18) implies the presence of the listener whose
response is reported in the half.
Although the two major locally contrastive wa patterns we have
described differ in the ways we have noted, they do have one important
property in common: both typically involve a switch in subject from the A
to the member of the pair. In fact, of the 299 wa uses in our sample, 227
(76%) occur on switched subjects, although the percentages vary somewhat
depending on the narrative in question, as Table 9 illustrates.
Next a boy comes by on a bike. That bike is big, really big. Even
though it's big like an adult bike, that boy must be less than ten.
In sum, our data suggest not only that the NP-ga --> NP-wa --> 0 prog
ression is not the paradigmatic means for introducing thematic participants
into oral narratives, but that thematicity must be coupled with either the
crossing of a discourse boundary or the presence of a local contrast in order
to trigger the middle, wa-marked stage of this progression.
When we turn our attention, though, to referential progressions
initiated by an NP bearing some case particle other than ga, quite a differ
ent picture emerges. Consider Table 10.
Table 10. Referential Progressions Initiated with Ga vs. Other Case Parti
cles
Second mention explicit Second mention wa
Ga-initiated chain 61/285(21%) 14/285 (6%)
Other particle- 69/ 82(84%) 23/ 82(28%)
initiated chain
Here we can see that, of the 82 non-subject NPs which are followed without
interference by another mention of the same character, a full 84% of the
second mentions involve explicit NPs. Of these explicit NPs, most (65%)
bear wa (33%), or ga (32%), so that, overall, a full 28% of second men
tions in non-ga-initiated chains carry wa. This is a very different profile
from what we get with NP-ga-initiated progressions, where only 21% of the
subsequent mentions are explicit and only 6% involve the particle wa. A
typical example involving a non-subject-initiated chain of the sort we are
considering here appears in (24).
(24) sore kajiri nagara, ojisan no
them DO munching while man LK front DO
toorisugite tta no. to ojisan wa, ... boke--tto
go-past:GER went NOM and man TP stupidly
shite,
do: GER
Munching on them, they passed by in front of the man. And the
man was bewildered,
The discrepancy in the behavior of NP-ga and NPs bearing the other case
46 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
III. CONCLUSIONS
In summary, our analysis of wα-marking in references to human partic
ipants in this sample of oral narratives suggests that the primary function of
wa is to serve as a local cohesive device, linking textual elements of varying
degrees of contrastivity. The data provide a basis for expanding earlier
analyses of the contrastive function of wa to include the marking of a broad
range of discourse contrasts, such as those between parallel but contrasting
activities or states, actions or states occurring in reaction to the preceding
event or situation, events or states that are unexpected and hence contrast
with the assumptions set up in the preceding narration, and transitions from
one unit of discourse to the next. The referents participating in these narra
tive contexts need not be especially important or thematic characters in the
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 47
story, but since important characters generally have a larger role in the
plot, there will be a tendency for wa-marking to occur on thematic partici
pants. Thus in our data the association between thematicity and wa-mark-
ing of a referent is one consequence of the use of wa as a locally motivated
marker of discourse cohesion.
An obvious question about our conclusions on the function of wa in
narrative is why they differ so much from those of other researchers, who
have emphasized the role of wa as a marker of thematic participants. Part
of the answer, we believe, lies in the differences between our data and
those on which earlier conclusions were based. Prior researchers, such as
Hinds & Hinds (1979), Maynard (1980), and Hamada (1983), have all
analyzed written folktales, whereas our analysis is based on oral narratives.
In the written mode, there is much greater leeway for planning and editing,
and so authors are more likely to use wa as a deliberate staging device to
indicate perspective and plot centrality, as Maynard has proposed, and to
exploit the potential of wa-marking for conveying subtle aspects of text
organization, such as discourse boundaries. Written style tends to be more
explicit than spoken discourse, and so introductory referential progressions
with two explicit mentions of the same character, NP-ga and NP-wa, are
more likely to occur, as Hinds & Hinds have found. Since written discourse
can be more carefully planned, the narrator can choose such a slower pace
for the presentation of especially important thematic characters.
Even within our sample of oral narratives, there were important differ
ences in wa-usage across our three data collections. In certain respects, our
cartoon data were more similar to the written texts which have been
analyzed by others than were our Sazaesan and Pear narratives. In the car
toon stories, narrators could take more time for planning because they had
the presence of the cartoon strips, which they could pause and examine, as
an excuse for violating normal expectations on pause length in spoken dis
course. Moreover, the planning task was surely simplified to a large extent
by the pre-selection and organization of the story into a few important
events, sparing narrators the difficult task of deciding what material to
include while narrating. Also, although the narrators were asked to speak
naturally on the cartoon task, some clearly attempted to mimic a storybook
style, as if reading to a young child. This probably increased narrators' use
of the devices common in the written folktales studied by other researchers,
such as frequent, explicit nominal reference with wa-marking of story
characters. The cartoon data included 211 cases of wa, 64.7% of which
48 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
frame boundaries.
It is thus clear that differences in the type of story and process of narra
tion can lead to differing usage of wa in Japanese narrative. We feel, how
ever, that the emphasis in prior research on thematic over locally contras
tive wa is not totally the result of differences in data base. Rather, it seems
likely that many cases of what we have analyzed as locally motivated wa
have not previously been recognized as such, since the prevailing view of
"contrastive wa" has been restricted semantically to a more limited set of
inter-clausal relationships. Once we recognize a broader range of contexts
for contrastive wa, it is apparent that a large number of the cases of wa-
marking on thematic participants could also be analyzed as locally contras
tive.
In this light, it is interesting to note that Ueno's (this volume) historical
analysis of wa indicates that the original function of wa was contrastive. The
particle was not, at first, used to create and maintain discourse themes, a
function to which it was later extended. Our findings imply that some sense
of contrast still underlies most uses of wa, and that even the discourse-level
contrasts thus indicated tend to be quite local. The use of wa as a global
thematic device, then, appears to be a derived function, both historically
and in the present sample of data. An obvious basis for the extension of wa
to a larger global function in texts is the fact that the characters most fre
quently participating in the various types of contrast marked by wa are usu
ally the more important ones; this provides the potential for the re-interpre
tation of wa as a global theme marker. This process of re-interpretation, it
would seem, has been carried the furthest in written narrative, where wa
serves as an important literary device in the organization of texts.
Given the variation in the usage of wa which we found across our three
collections of oral narratives and the extensive differences between oral and
written narrative, it is apparent that different cognitive and discourse con
straints elicit different frequencies and, to some extent, functions of wa-
marking. Obviously, much further research will be necessary for a complete
understanding of the functions of wa in Japanese discourse. On the basis of
the present research, however, we would propose that at least for oral nar
ratives, the primary function of wα-marking on human participants is to
serve as a cohesive device between locally contrasting elements of text.
50 P A T R I C I A M. C L A N C Y A N D P A M E L A D O W N I N G
NOTES
*We would like to thank each other for all the valuable advice and criticisms we gave one
another while working on this paper and to blame any remaining errors on each other. Thanks
also to Shoichi Iwasaki, for sharing his native intuitions with us, and for helping us in many other
ways, and to Knud Lambrecht, for giving us detailed criticisms of an earlier draft.
1) Our transcription conventions essentially follow those described in Chafe (1980) for the
Pear film narratives. Periods are used for sentence-final falling intonation, question marks for
sentence-final rising intonation, commas for clause-final but not sentence-final intonation con
tours. Questionable transcriptions are enclosed in slashes, and two dashes indicate lengthened
segments. A single dash marks the cut-off point of a false start. Audible silent pauses are indi
cated by three dots breaks in timing too short to be heard as silent pauses are indicated by two
dots.
2) In measuring persistence, we counted mentions in both main and subordinate clauses, and
a coreferential embedded subject, e.g., in the complement of a verb thinking like u 'think',
was counted as an elliptical reference to the same subject as the matrix verb. Except for refer
ences to first or second persons, references to a character within a quote were also allowed to
serve as the starting point for coreferential chains extending beyond the quote, and we counted
"into" quotes if the subject of the quote was coreferential with the character in a preceding ellip
sis chain. On the other hand, subordinate clauses intervening between matrix arguments and the
matrix predicate were not counted as interrupting an ellipsis chain, nor were embedded clauses,
including relative clauses, complements, or the contents of direct quotes. Clauses with tte yuu
kanji de, however, were.
Referential chains that did not begin with an NP were not tabulated at all. Only the final
version of repaired clauses was counted; repeated clauses with a verb were counted like other
clauses. Cases in which subjects appeared in both preverbal and postverbal position in the same
clause were counted as a single nominal reference in preverbal position. References in subject
position to non-human props were counted as ending a chain of persisting (human) coreference,
but generic NPs and self-references by the narrator were ignored, and persistence chains were
counted "through" them.
In determining the valence of predicates with elliptical arguments, we used the following
principles: Quotations which lacked a verb of saying but had a quotative complementizer (i.e.,
to, tte), were counted as having an ellipted subject at the position of the complementizer; quota
tions without complementizers were not. "Double subject" constructions such as kiga tsuku were
counted as having human experiences. Indirect objects were attributed to the verbs ageru
'give', kiku 'listen', and request verbs such as tazuneru 'request', but the verb iu 'say' was
counted as having an indirect object only if it was explicit. Subjects of verbs such as wakaru 'un
derstand' were counted as such even when marked by ni.
3) Although cases of NPs without any particle are sometimes analyzed as instances of NP-WA,
there may be subtle differences between the discourse functions of such "bare" NPs and
topicalized NPs (cf. Lee 1984 for discussion of the differences in Korean). Therefore, we have
treated these NPs, like all other nominal co-references, as ending an ellipsis chain, and accord
ingly, any special status established by wa-marking.
4) For our tabulation of zero switch reference, we again counted as intervening only mentions
in main and subordinate clauses (e.g., those ending in kara 'because', to 'when, if, etc.), but not
relative or complement clauses. The contents of quotes were ignored, as were main or subordi
nate clause mentions of non-human referents or the narrator.
WA AS A COHESION MARKER 51
5) Hinds & Hinds (1979) treat such wa-marked switch references as cases of episode bound
aries marked by a change in participant orientation. However, in our data switch reference with
wa-marking frequently occurred within a single temporal/spatial framework, such as a conversa
tion, and we have distinguished these much more frequent cases from switch reference at
episode boundaries involving major shifts in time, location, or narrator's point of view.
6) There is unfortunately no comparable literature on contrastive stress in Japanese.
7) A number of investigators have in fact claimed that contrastive uses of wa are simply one
subtype of the thematic uses. See, for example, Maynard (1980) and Hamada (1983).
8) It could also be argued that each of these two NP-was constitutes a thematic usage, result
ing in a very rapid thematic cutting back and forth as the text proceeds. This interpretation may
be correct, but, as we noted above, in the absence of any clearly agreed upon criteria for recog
nizing sentence-level thematic participants, we will abstain from any judgments as to the thema-
ticity of the two participants and confine ourselves to discussing the locally contrastive reading
which is more available.
9) Chafe (1976) in fact makes the existence of a limited pool of possible candidates for the
contrastive slot one of the criteria for his definition of contrastive constructions.
REFERENCES
APPENDIX A
Bike Accident Cartoon
54 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
APPENDIX
Pear Film:
The film opens with a man picking pears in a tree. While he is thus
occupied, a man passes by leading a goat. Next comes a boy on a bicycle,
who rides off with a basket of the pear man's pears. On the road he passes
a girl on a bike; distracted by her, he bumps into a rock and falls from his
bike with the pears. At this point three other boys appear on the scene,
help the bike boy put his pears back, and send him on his way. As this
threesome leaves the scene, they discover the bike boy's hat on the road
where it fell during his accident, and return it to him. In exchange, the bike
boy gives them three pears. The threesome then continue down the road,
one playing with a paddleball, and pass by the pear man. The pear man,
who has in the meantime discovered his loss, watches in puzzlement as the
threesome pass by eating his pears.
Sazaesan Videotape:
The mother of a baby named Ikura becomes ill, and he is left at
Sazaesan's house for babysitting. He empties the shoe rack at the entrance
and ransacks the desk drawers of the school-age siblings of Sazaesan,
Wakame and Katsuo, who demand that he be punished. But the adults of
household — Sazaesan and her mother and father — refuse, pointing out
that Ikura is only a baby. The mischief and the argument between Wakame
and Katsuo and the adults continues until Ikura's father comes to take him
home. The next day Ikura's father arrives alone, and apologizes for the
56 PATRICIA M. CLANCY AND PAMELA DOWNING
baby's mischief. All are amazed, since none of them had complained and
since Ikura, they believe, is too young to talk. In the last scene, however,
Ikura's mother brings him for a visit, and explains that she, as his mother,
can understand his speech, and reveals that he had told her that he had
actually been attempting, with all his apparent mischief, to find medicine
for her.
Cartoon Strips'.
After the narrator was shown a card depicting the four children who
would figure in the stories and was told their names, the cartoon strips were
shown in the fixed order given below.
Theft: Hiroshi is engrossed in playing with his top. He fails to notice
Taroo come and ride off on his bicycle until the last frame, where he stands
amazed.
Sand Fight: Hiroshi and Taroo play happily in a sandbox until Taroo
starts a fight by kicking over Hiroshi's sand castle; a teacher then comes and
has them make up.
Exchange: Yuki and Sachi play in a park; when Yuki loses her bal
loon, Sachi gives her hers, and in return Yuki gratefully gives Sachi her hat.
Bike Accident: Taroo rides his bicycle past a pond where Yuki and
Sachi are feeding the ducks. He is distracted; his bike hits a rock, and he
falls in the pond.
Snow Fight: Taroo makes a snowman and then throws snowballs at
Yuki and Sachi, who have also made a snowman and given it an umbrella
to protect it against the impending rain. Yuki and Sachi flee indoors under
the barrage of snowballs; when it rains, Taroo's snowman, but not theirs,
melts.
Onigiri: Yuki makes onigiri and then gives them to her friends in the
park, who find them unappetizing.
Dress-up: Yuki and Sachi are left alone by their mothers and dress up
in adults' clothes. When their mothers return, they laugh at the girls'
strange appearance.
THEMATIZATION AS A STAGING DEVICE
IN THE JAPANESE NARRATIVE*
SENKO K. MAYNARD
Rutgers University
It is often said that every art form expresses the creator's point of view,
or what Uspensky refers to as the "viewing position" (Uspensky, 1973:2).
Each writer must take a certain viewing position or positions which deter
mine what he/she sees and what he/she represents in his/her writing. The
particular perspective chosen by the narrator is an important aspect of story
telling, for it reveals the narrator's personal commitment to the mode of
narrativity.
One powerful device available for expressing the narrator's perspective
in Japanese is thematization and/or the avoidance of it, i.e., non-thematiza-
tion. The Japanese language provides an overt morphological device, wa,
to mark what is widely called the "theme" of the sentence. It is true that the
concept of "theme" has been defined differently by a number of linguists
[see, for instance, Mathesius (Firbas, 1964), Firbas (1964), Halliday (1967),
Hinds (1973), Chafe (1976), Kuno (1976) and Iwasaki (1981)]. Regardless
of the differences in definitions, the implication is clear in all previous
studies that thematization signals crucial information for narrative interpre
tation.
Consider the fact that thematization is a device for realizing what
Chafe (1976) calls "packaging." Packaging, Chafe states, has to do "primar
ily with how the message is sent and only secondarily with the message
itself" (1976:28). Chafe points out six packaging phenomena relevant to
nouns within a sentence. These include:
1. given or new
2. focus or contrast
3. definite or indefinite
4. subject of the sentence
58 SENKO K. MAYNARD
more readily has empathy with a thematized participant than with a non-
thematized one. As will be exemplified later, NPga is often used to describe
the actions as observed from the point of view of the thematized partici
pant.
For new, unexpected and subordinate information, the avoidance of
wa marking, i.e., the strategy of non-thematizing, is practiced. Most fre
quently such participants continue to be marked by ga although they repre
sent "given" information. It is important to note here that ga is attached to
indicate new information not in the sense that it cannot have been previ
ously mentioned, although it is often the case that it has not been, but in the
sense that the speaker presents it as not being currently activated in the
reader's consciousness. In short, in the case of non-thematized participants
a direct reference point for its integration to the thematic line is missing. In
this sense, non-thematized participants provide subordinate and secondary
information within the structure of the narrative. These participants do not
stay on the stage for a long time; their status is characterized by frequent
appearance, disappearance and/or reappearance at various phases of the
plot development. Non-thematized participants often become the focus of
attention when their action and description are introduced as if constituting
new information from the point of view of thematized participants. Because
of this dramatic impact, the non-thematized participant's action is described
vividly and its movement is often more likely to receive closer attention.
Closely related to this issue of the manner of description is the gen-
shoobun (sentence of immediate description)/handanbun (sentence of judg
ment) distinction developed by Mio which is discussed in Nagano (1972).3
According to Nagano, Mio points out that genshoobun is syntactically
characterized by NP + ga + VP, where VP includes present progressive
forms such as -teiru, -deiru, -teru, -deru or the past tense -ta, -da forms, and
defines genshoobun as the following. Genshoobuns are sentences that rep
resent phenomena as they are. These sentences that express phenomena
perceived and reflected emotionally are arrived at without the process of
judgment. There is no gap between the phenomenon and its descriptive
expression. Since there is no subjective view to intrude between the phe
nomenon and the expression, there is no responsibility on the part of the
user in regard to their contents. 4 In fact, what seems to happen in the narra
tive is that when ga is used, even when it marks the so-called given informa
tion, such expression gives the impression of urgency and immediacy that
enjoys the focus of attention.
THEMATIZATION AS A STAGING DEVICE 63
are not so much "singled out" but rather remain in the total conceptual
framework to maintain a flow of thought in the form of evoked, activated
and stored information.
More recently, Brown and Yule (1983) use the term "staging" in an
even broader sense. For them, "staging" includes various rhetorical devices
like lexical selection, rhyme, alliteration, repetition, use of metaphor, mar
kers of emphasis, etc. In fact, Brown and Yule use "staging" "not as a tech
nical term, but as a general metaphor to cover the exploitation of these var
ied phenomena in discourse" (1983:134). In this paper, however, we con
centrate on the thematization strategy realized by the use and the non-use
of the particle wa in Japanese.
Let us now turn to an examination of data sets (I) and (II) again, this
time in terms of "staging" as proposed here. In data set (I), the old woman,
because it is marked by wa in (1.5) (theme creation), and because it con
tinues to be marked by wa in (1.9) (theme maintenance), is assumed to
remain stored in the registry of the reader's consciousness. Here the story is
told as if the old woman provided the constant line of thought into which
new information may merge. In (1.9) for example, the old woman functions
to reassure the reader that this discourse segment is still basically a descrip
tion of the old woman and now, new information which is seidashite sentaku
shimashita "worked hard washing clothes" is added. It is as if the reader
understands the development of the story through successive stative
oriented descriptions of the old woman rather than through the results of
any specific action taking place on the stage. Action, of course, does occur,
but it is packaged in such a manner that the entire scene, and not each act
itself, comes into focus. The narrator prefers this type of plot development
in data set (I), while in data set (II), a non-thematization strategy is
selected. In (II), we find cases where a participant which presumably com
prises "given" imformation, i.e., obaasan "the old woman," is non-
thematized in a matrix clause as in (II.2) and (II.5). Here, the old woman
as well as her action is in focus. Action is described as a vivid incident which
enjoys the reader's close attention. Sentences (II.2) and (II.5) do not
describe the old woman's action as a change of state as was the case in data
set (I). Rather, unlike the cases of (I.5) and (I.9), the old woman is intro
duced as if it is new information and thus becomes the focus of temporary
attention. In terms of thematic development then, the old woman in data
set (II) constitutes a secondary subordinate element that must be incorpo
rated into the thematic line. While the use of the old woman in data sets
(I.5) and (I.9) encourages us to keep her in our consciousness, the use of the
THEMATIZATION AS A STAGING DEVICE 65
old woman in (II.2) and (II.5) encourages the reader to focus on that infor
mation temporarily. 7 In data set (2), at least in (II.2) and (II.5), obaasan ga
'the old woman' does not serve as strong a function as in (I.5) and (I.9) in
establishing the thematic flow of the narrative. In this sense we can state
that it is as if the ga sentences are subordinate sentences in the total scheme
of narrative organization.
The reader is reminded at this point that it is significant that the ga
which obligatorily replaces noncontrastive wa in subordinate clauses
behaves similarly on the intrasentential level. We can conclude then that on
both intrasentential and intersentential levels, ga marks either new infor
mation or non-thematized subordinate information.
We have so far examined the contrast in participant identification in
data sets (I) and (II). Now we turn to data sets (III) and (IV) in order to
examine how the staging strategy may be used in a narrative segment. Data
set (III) is taken from Miyazawa's Kaze no Matasaburoo, while data set
(IV) consists of the identical discourse segment but with the three partici
pants marked with particles different from the original. Namely, in sen
tences (1) through (19), Kasuke is marked with ga, and in sentences (20)
through (44), Ichiro's brother is marked with wa consistently.8
(III/IV) 1. futo kasuke (III) wa me o hirakimashita.
suddenly Kasuke TP eyes DO opened
(iv) ga
SB
Suddenly, Kasuke woke up and opened his eyes.
2. haiiro no kiri ga hay aku hay aku tondeimasu.
grey LK mist SB fast fast flying
A grey mist was moving in fast.
3. soshite uma ga sugu me no ni
and horse SB right eye LK in-front LC
nossonto tatteita no desu.
stolidly was-standing NOM COP
And a horse was standing stolidly in front of his eyes.
4. sono me wa kasuke osorete
those eyes TP Kasuke DO be-afraid-of:GER
yokonohoo muiteimashita.
sideways DO was-looking
Its eyes were averted in fear of Kasuke.
SENKO K. MAYNARD
pants are major characters (although less so in the case of Ichiro's brother)
and are expected to remain in the reader's consciousness.9 However, in this
scene, Saburo [as in sentence (.6)] suddenly comes into Kasuke's view as
he opens his eyes. From Kasuke's point of view, Saburo indeed represents
"new" information. Likewise, Ichiro's brother and Ichiro comprise new
information as they appear in the scene. In sentence (III. 18), Ichiro is intro
duced as if new, being marked by ga, to which Saburo (which is marked by
wa) responds in sentence (III. 19). Here, Ichiro's action is in focus while
Saburo's response is taken to be a description of the change of state and
Saburo plays a role in maintaining the reader's line of thought.
In scene 2, grandfather, which is marked by wa in (III.26) now
occupies a stable position in the scene and interacts with Ichiro's brother
who continues to be marked by ga throughout the scene, except in sentence
(III.30). Note that the event takes place at grandfather's place and his
response to the return of the boys serves as the thread of discourse. Thus,
the interaction of participants, specifically Ichiro's brother with his grand
father becomes such that the former is marked by ga and the latter by wa.10
Ichiro's brother's actions themselves are in focus and are to be incorporated
into the plot development that is primarily maintained by the wa identified
participant, the grandfather. In this sense Ichiro's brother's action is pre
sented as secondary and subordinate in terms of the degree of direct con
tribution it makes to the maintenance of the thematic line, as was suggested
earlier.
In contrast with this original narrative, data set (IV), with a slight man
ipulation of staging, represents a different narrative point of view which is
realized by a different thematic structure. In scene 1, Kasuke now is nonth-
ematized and treated as a character temporarily placed on the stage, as if
anticipating that something else will happen, and in scene 2, Ichiro's
brother is now thematized, presenting a constant figure who occupies
center stage for a longer period of time. This time it is not through Kasuke's
eyes, but through Ichiro's brother's eyes that the narrator tells the story.
We can see in data sets (III) and (IV) then, the thematization strategy func
tioning for the manifestation of the narrator's choice for staging.11
At this point a report on the preliminary experiment on staging is in
order. In order to test our hypothesis about the "staging" function, we con
ducted a paragraph completion test. Sixty adult native speakers of Japanese
were asked to create a narrative to continue a given discourse segment con
sisting of four sentences and two participants as shown in paragraph (Va)
and (Vb).
74 SENKO K. MAYNARD
by Taroo ga, however, we find only two such cases. This seems to be caused
by the fact that since in Taroo wa narratives, Taro is already established on
the stage, the other participant in the event, Tetsuo, is introduced as an
opposite interactant or an antagonist. But if Taroo wa is not yet established
as in Taroo ga narratives, Tetsuo is less likely to be in the initial sentence.
It is as if the unfinished business of establishing a potential theme has to be
actualized prior to the introduction of the other individual. Tetsuo wa, how
ever, may occur if Taro is mentioned within the same sentence since this
strategy would ensure the connection (in terms of reference) with sentence
(V.4). In fact, this is precisely the case in the two examples where Tetsuo
appeared in the intial sentence. In both cases, Tetsuo is "staged" to become
the dominant and constant figure only after a clear association with Taro is
made by establishing Taro in subordinate clauses such as: taroo ga sono
gohyakuen hooka hirou to tetsuo wa suguni sore wa jibun ga kinoo
chichioya ni moratta no da to iidashita "When Taro picked up that five
hundred yen coin, Tetsuo right away began to insist that he got it from his
father the day before" and taroo ga sono gohyakuen kooka hirou no o te-
tsuo-kun wa mite imashita ga kizukanai furi o shiteimashita "Tetsuo watched
Taro pick up that five hundred yen coin, but he pretended as if he didn't
notice."
Another significant finding of the staging effect is the decision of over
all theme-establishment being triggered by an earlier occurrence of NP wa.
In Taroo wa narratives, three narratives [including the sample data set
(VI)] evolve only around Taro, while in Taroo ga narratives we find no such
example. While it is possible that either Taroo or Tetsuo may become
thematized during the course of the narrative, since subjects were free to
choose his/her own thematic development, it is significant that only in
Taroo wa narratives do we witness the case where Taro is chosen as the
main character to maintain plot cohesiveness in the created narrative. If the
character is marked by ga, the subject is likely to have more freedom to
choose either or both of the participants to maintain the thematic line.
Whereas the aforementioned interpretation is moderately supportive
of the staging hypothesis, we must bear in mind the weaknesses of this
experiment. Beyond the fact that data are limited, the empirical testing of
a narrative function — especially an elusive notion such as "staging" —
seems only partially possible, at best. Since a linguistic device functions on
more than one level, and since staging is influenced by factors beyond wa
marking, a multitude of variables are simultaneously involved in such an
T H E M A T I Z A T I O N AS A S T A G I N G D E V I C E 79
NOTES
•This paper is a slightly revised version of my paper "Thematization as a Staging Device in the
Japanese Narrative" read at the 36th annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies,
Washington D.C., March, 1984. I would like to thank Seiichi Makino, John Hinds, Shoichi
Iwasaki and participants at the panel for helpful discussions of the issues discussed herein. My
special thanks to John Hinds for his cooperation on the experiment portion. Naturally, the
author is solely responsible for the conclusions, opinions and errors.
1) Definitions of the given and new information vary. Prince (1981) characterizes three types
of "givenness," namely, 1) predictability/recoverability, 2) saliency and 3) shared knowledge.
For further discussion on how these concepts are associated with the walga distinction, see
Maynard (1980).
2) Although as suggested elsewhere (Maynard 1982c) it is likely that wa has multiple func
tions that span over different levels and aspects of the Japanese language, this paper concen
trates on the function of wa closely associated with participant identification as observed on the
discourse level of the Japanese narrative.
3) Unfortunately Mio's original work (Mio, Isago, 1948 Kokugohoo Bunshooron, Tokyo:
Sanseidoo) has not been accessible. Discussion of Mio's work is based on Nagano (1972).
80 SENKO K. M A Y N A R D
REFERENCES
Brown, Gillian & George Yule. 1983. Discourse analysis. London: Cam
bridge University Press.
Chafe, Wallace. 1976. "Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects
topics and point of view." Subject and topic, ed. by Charles N. Li, 27-55.
THEMATIZATION AS A STAGING DEVICE 81
Text References
Miyazawa, Kenji. 1961. Kaze no matasaburoo. Shinchoobunko. Tokyo:
Shinchoosha.
Tsubota, Jooji. 1975. Nihon mukashibanashishuu. Shinchoobunko. Tokyo:
Shinchoosha.
THEMATIZATION, ASSUMED FAMILIARITY, STAGING,
AND SYNTACTIC BINDING IN JAPANESE 1
JOHN HINDS
Penn State University
"anaphoric" and "specific" in Kuno 1973. There he explains that only ele
ments which are in the "discourse registry" may be marked by wa. The dis
course registry is an abstract entity which keeps track of objects and con
cepts which are introduced into a discourse [see also Hinds 1976]. Kuno
considers that objects and concepts in discourse are recorded in this "dis
course registry", and that there are two major ways in which items may be
registered. First, they may be items of unique reference such as the sun, the
moon, my wife. Second, they may be objects of specific reference which are
added to the registry the first time they are mentioned in a discourse, such
as a man I saw yesterday.
Kuno 1973:39 states:
Only after this entry in the registry is accomplished can [these objects and
concepts] become themes of sentences [i.e. can be marked by wa (JH)].
Thus, for Kuno, an item of specific reference may not become a theme on
its initial mention in a discourse [see also Kuno 1972]. Moreover, it is not
the case that any specific item which is mentioned in a discourse automati
cally becomes a theme. Kuno 1973:40 states:
What determines whether a specific noun phrase can become a topic or not
depends on whehter the noun phrase is anaphoric and not whether it is
definite.
Figure 1
ASSUMED FAMILIARITY
(Unanchored) Anchored
distinct cleavage between examples (1) and (2) on the one hand, and exam
ples (3) through (7) on the other. Examples (1) and (2) require their noun
phrases to be marked by the indefinite article a, while (3) through (7)
require the. This may easily be seen by substituting the noun phrase The
Mayor for Rotten Rizzo in (3), and by substituting The lucky bum for Lucky
me in (7).
If we reexamine the distribution of the postpositional particles wa and
ga from the standpoint of this taxonomy, we discover that those items
termed "Inferrable" and "Evoked" are typically marked by wa.Ą This much
is well known to the linguistic public, and is simply a refinement of the term
"given".
In Prince's category "New", however, we find, contrary to expecta
tion, that ga does not mark each of these noun phrases. We find that noun
phrases which indicate "Unused New" information are marked by wa.
Further, we find that "Brand-New Anchored" information may be marked
by either wa or ga. It is only the category "Brand-New Unanchored" which
obligatorily requires ga marking.
Figure 2 presents this information.
Figure 2
ASSUMED FAMILIARITY
(Unanchored) Anchored
[ga] [ga/wa]
positional particles wa and ga. He points out that certain types of news
items, such as reports of traffic accidents, contain almost totally new infor
mation. This observation accounts for the distribution of wa and ga he finds
in such new reports. In a nine clause article, he finds that there are only
three instances of the postpositional particle wa. Each of these uses is
explained by principles enunciated in Kuno 1972 and Hinds 1976.
Rowe presents without analysis a second news report which contains
some difficulties in the interpretation of the distribution of wa and ga. This
news report is presented here in its entirety.
tsugi ni, mosukuwa hatsu mainichi shinbun tokuden.
Next, a special Mainichi Shimbun report from Moscow.
sobieto kyoosantoo no kikan shinbun purauda wa, yokka, genzai nippon de
okonawarete iru migu 25 no kaitaichoosasagyoo wa nissoo kankei no kyooka
samatageyoo to suru hanso seiryoku no sakuboo da to hinan suru ippoo.
ippoo.
On the fourth, Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party Newspaper, accused
the Japanese government of the dismantling operation of its MIG 25 by
saying that it is an anti-Soviet scheme which will hinder the strengthening
of Japanese-Soviet ties.
nippon kokunai і yoo na ugoki ni hantai shi, sobieto to no zenrin
kankei kyooka suru ga takamatte iru to hoojimashita.
They report that within Japan, in opposition to this movement, there are
voices being raised to strengthen the good-neighbor relations with the
Soviet Union.
kore wa, purauda no rassheiefu tookyoo tokuhain no kaita kiji de
chakurikushi de no migukaitai wa sobieto no kitainhenkanyookyuu mushi
shita ue, amerika no senmonka mo sanka shite tettootetsubi supaimokuteki
de okonawarete iru to shiteki suru to tomo ni, nippon no jieitai no shidoobu
wa sobieto o kasooteki to minasu reisendokutorin no shinpoosha de aru
koto ga bakuro sreta to hinan shite imasu.
This article was written by Rasheiev, a special correspondent for Pravda to
Tokyo. He said that the operation was continuing despite the Soviet's
request for the return of the MIG 25, and that some American experts had
been involved through espionage activity. He also reported that the leader
of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces had been a proponent of the Cold
War Doctrine which describes the Soviet Union as a hypothetical enemy.
Of the five boldfaced noun phrases marked by wa, two cause some
trouble for an analysis which requires wa-arked noun phrases to be
anaphoric, or predictable information. The first noun phrase marked by wa
might be considered to be part of the discourse registry, since the byline is
THEMATIZATION IN JAPANESE 89
from Moscow. The second noun phrase, however, is certainly not predicta
ble information in any sense of the term, since the story from Moscow could
have involved anything related to Russia, or any other item for that matter.
The third noun phrase marked by wa is clearly anaphoric. The fourth
noun phrase is anaphoric, although it is not predictable. Other concepts
could have occupied this position equally well, including sobieto to no zen-
rinkankei o kyooka shiyoo to shite iru nihonjin. The final noun phrase
marked by wa might conceivably be argued to be introduced by implication
[see Hinds 1976], but again a question arises concerning the predictability
of nippon no jieitai no shidoobu.
The distribution of wa and ga in this news item appears to cast strong
doubt on any analysis which relies exclusively on the notions of anaphoric-
ity and predictable information. Even if the concept of anaphoricity is
extended to include those elements which are implied by overt elements,
there is still a problem with the notion of predictability.
If this report is looked at in terms of Prince's taxonomy, however, the
distribution of wa and ga is explainable. The first two noun phrases repre
sent New-Unused information. The second two represent Textually
Evoked information, while the final noun phrase represents Containing-
Inferrable information, since it may legitimately be assumed that the jieitai
has a leader. All of these types of information, as pointed out above, are
normally marked by wa.
This same analysis can help to explain the systematic use of wa to mark
the initial noun phrase of magazine articles. As the following example
taken from the January 27, 1984 issue of FOCUS demonstrates, even noun
phrases on first mention can be marked by wa. Clearly, in these cases the
noun phrases are neither anaphoric nor predictable. 5
FUKKATSU SHITA "MUCHIUCHI KEF
A RETURN TO FLOGGING
gookanotoko ga uketa isuramu hoo dentoo keibatsu no nākami
The traditional punishment which a rapist receives
pakisutan no toshi karachi ni aru sakkaajoo ni atsumatta gunshuu wa yaku
3000 і.
A crowd of about 3000 gathered at a soccer field in the Pakistani city of
Karachi.
betsu ni sakkaa geemu kenbutsu shiyoo to iu no de wa naku, karera ga
katazu nonde machikamaete iru no wa "isuramu hoo ga gunsei ni shiko
sareru shunkan" de aru.
90 JOHN HINDS
They had not come to see a soccer match. They were waiting anxiously for
"the moment that Islamic Law would be strictly carried out."
In the first sentence, "the crowd" is introduced with the postpositional
particle wa. A more literal translation of this sentence is:
The crowd which gathered at a certain soccer field in the Pakistani city of
Karachi [numbered] about 3000.
The second sentence develops this scenario which has been created by
talking about the crowd's "eager anticipation". Again, this is not predicta
ble information in any sense of the term. A literal translation of the rele
vant portion of this sentence is:
The thing which they are anxiously awaiting is "the moment that Islamic
Law is strictly carried out.''
Both of these noun phrases represent Containing-Inferrable Informa
tion. In the first case, the head noun gunshuu "crowd" is modified by the
relative clause "which gathered at a certain soccer field in the Pakistani
city of Karachi". The specificity of this relative clause has determined the
fact that it is Containing. In the second example, the fact that the anaphoric
karera "they" is in the relative clause establishes the fact that it is Contain
ing.
It is important here to point out that there are syntactic constructions
in Japanese which "bind" an author to a particular spot on the taxonomy.
As an example of this, consider the fact that Japanese, as discussed by Li
and Thompson 1976, is both a topic-prominent language and a subject-
prominent language. The consequences of this are that both sentences of
type (A) and type (B) are unmarked, where (A) typifies a subject-promi
nent construction, and (B) typifies a topic-prominent construction. (B) type
sentences may be reduced to the syntactic formula NP wa NP desu.
(A) uchi-no musuko ga/wa tookyoo ni ikimashita.
our son Tokyo to went
Our son went to Tokyo.
tanaka-san ga/wa raishuu sono hon o yomu deshoo.
next-week that book read probably
Mr. Tanaka will read that book next week.
(B) tookyoo ni itta no wa uchi-no musuko desu.
Tokyo to went NOM our son copula
The one who went to Tokyo is our son.
THEMATIZATION IN JAPANESE 91
Well, the first time, when was that? uh, anyway, it was when I
was in North Carolina-Carolina, see?
W217. sugoku chiisa na gakkoo datta no ne,
very small LK school was nom EX
and I was at a really small school.
H218. nn.
nn
I see.
W219. sore-de, machi made iku no-ni,
and town to go to
So, in order to get to the town,
W220. (0.7) gakkoo kara basu ga- minibasu ga dete-ru wake,
school from bus SB mini-bus SB going reason
there's a bus- a minibus that goes from the school.
H221. hn-hn.
un-hum
Uh-huh.
W222. tatoeba, ichinichi ni sankai gurai ne?
e.g. one-day in 3-time about EM
For example, it goes about three times a day, see?
H223. nn.
nn
I see.
W224. de, aru fuyu: datta ka-na,
uh a winter was wonder
So, let's see, it was one winter,
W225. , yuki ga futte-te ne,
like snow SB falling EX
uh, it had been snowing, see?
H226. nn.
nn
I see.
W227. sore-de, betsu-ni, , nantomo omowazu-ni
and special like nothing not-think
94 JOHN HINDS
Waribashi
(1) shokudoo de waribashi tsukau.
dining-hall LC waribashi DO use
We use "waribashi" (half-split throw-away chopsticks) to eat.
tsukaistue de-aru
use-throw COP
After use, they are thrown away.
suterareta hashi wa ittai doo naru no
threw-PASS chopsticks TM what how become NOM
dar oo.
PRESUMP
What happens to them after they are thrown away?
mottainai-na, to u no wa senchuuha no
wasteful QT think NOM TM war-generation LK
ijimashisa daroo ka.
stinginess PRESUMP QU
Is it merely the stinginess of those who lived through the war to
feel that it is a waste?
THEMATIZATION IN JAPANESE 97
tsumori wa nai.
intent TM NEG
We have no intention of condemning the use-and throw-away
system in connection with "waribashi"
shikashi nenhan 100-okuzen-bun no ga sono mama
however yearly 10,000-million LK tree SB that condition
kiete-shimau no wa ika-ni-mo mottainai.
disappear NOM TM really wasteful
But it is very wasteful when trees amounting to 10,000 million
pairs of wooden chopsticks disappear each year.
With the exception of the first paragraph, the initial noun phrase in
each paragraph is marked by wa. There are, of course, other noun phrases
marked by wa, but they will not be considered here. The question to be
asked is why each of these noun phrases can be marked by wa. To answer
this question, it is necessary to understand the rhetorical pattern which
organizes this essay.
The essay is organized according to a pattern known as ki-shoo-ten-
ketsu [see Hinds 1983a, 1984]. This rhetorical style is described by
Takemata 1976:
A. ki First, begin one's argument.
B. shoo Next, develop that.
ten At the point where this development is finished, turn the
idea to a subtheme where there is a connection, but not a
directly connected association [to the major theme].
D. ketsu Last, bring all of this together and reach a conclusion.
The version of the rhetorical pattern which is used in this essay has a
proliferation of ten. This means that there are a number of tangentially
related subtopics brought up rather upbruptly, with little forewarning. The
function of each paragraph in this essay is listed in Chart 1.
Chart 1
(1) ki (5) ten
(2) shoo (6) ten
(3) ten (7) ten
(4) ten (8) ketsu
In the first paragraph, the initial sentence contains no noun phrase
marked by wa.9 The first sentence of paragraph 2 contains an introductory
102 JOHN HINDS
such as, "The following may seem to be unrelated to the major point, but
the connection between Rikyu and chopsticks will become clear in due
time."
I have attempted to document the following points in this paper. First,
the taxonomy of "Assumed Familiarity" introduced in Prince 1981 contri
butes greatly to the understanding of certain aspects of the distribution of
the postpositional particles wa and ga. In particular, only noun phrases
which indicate Unanchored Brand-New information are required to use ga.
Other types of New information — Anchored Brand-New information and
Unused information — may be marked by the postpositional particle wa.
Second, noun phrases which appear in topic-comment structures, as
opposed to subject-predicate structures, typically mark the initial noun
phrase with wa.10 A reason for this is that such noun phrases, even if they
represent new information, frequently indicate anchored new information
or unused information.
Third is the concept of staging, or marking in a special manner those
noun phrases which are to become the central character rather than
peripheral characters. Specifically, noun phrases which are marked by wa
remain on stage for a longer period of time than those not so marked. This
has been discussed in Hinds 1983b and in Maynard 1984 (and this volume).
Maynard (1984:7) states:
What the narrator wishes to accomplish through "staging" is to discrimi
nate the thematized participants from non-thematized ones in such a way
that thematized participants remain activated, evoked and stored in the
reader's consciousness.
Fourth, there are dramatic and rhetorical pressures for using wa to
mark noun phrases which indicate Unused information. One such dramatic
pressure is that readers are drawn into novels, short stories, or articles more
quickly when it appears the referent of a noun phrase is known to the
reader, wa functions to inform the reader to treat such initial noun phrases
as items of information they should already know. Another pressure is
rhetorical in that the appearance of a noun phrase marked by wa in the ten
of the ki-shoo-ten-ketsu rhetorical pattern informs the reader that the infor
mation in the noun phrase so marked has a connection with the overall
theme of the article, even if the connection is not immediately obvious.
104 JOHN HINDS
NOTES
1) I would like to thank Shoichi Iwasaki, Wako Hinds, Pat Clancy, and Senko Maynard for
comments and suggestions. Any errors remain my own.
2) See Hinds 1982, 1983a for a discussion of conversational situations in which no postposi
tional particles occur.
3) See Hinds 1973 for discussion of theme and rheme in which postpositional particles other
than wa and ga are considered.
4) See Maynard 1981 for instances in which ga marks noun phrases which represent inferrable
or evoked information.
5) The translations of these sentences provided here do not necessarily reflect the structure of
the Japanese sentences.
6) Note that kuruma "car" is marked by ga in W231 despite the fact that it is "postposed" [see
Hinds 1982]. This indicates that at this point in the story W is not treating the car as a thematic
element. That is, this segment of the story is not about the car, but about W [see Maynard 1981].
7) This is consistent with Kuno's 1973 account in which ga is used in subordinate clauses
[see also Hinds and Hinds 1979]. This is also consistent with traditional pedagogical grammars
which state that the noun phrase marked by wa focuses on the rest of the sentence [see Alfonso
1966, Jorden 1964, Martin 1954].
8) In Hinds 1975, I discuss the use of "backwards pronominalization" in English to build sus
pense. There is a direct parallel between the use of pronouns in English and the use of NP wa in
Japanese.
9) The sentence does contain an instance of ellipsis. The "subject" of the sentence is the
speaker, an item of unique reference, and so it may be freely omitted, even on first mention [see
Hinds 1982].
10) As Martin 1975:867 has shown, however, noun phrases in such constructions can be
marked by ga.
(a) mainichi kaisha o deru no ga oru kuji (da).
Everyday I leave the office at 9:00 pm.
(b) ichiban komatta no ga joyuu-busoku de aru.
The worst part is the shortage of actresses.
REFERENCES
SHOICHI IWASAKI
University of California, Los Angeles
0. INTRODUCTION
This chapter is intended to contribute to the understanding of the
Japanese particle wa by observing its behavior in Japanese spoken exposi
tory discourse, specifically, descriptions of "apartment lay-outs". It has
become increasingly clear to discourse researchers that the behavior of wa
is different in different types of discourse. Yet the picture of wa that this
chapter presents is broad enough to represent many aspects of the distribu
tion of this particle. I attempt to describe the particle from two different
perspectives: a description of the discourse pragmatic status of a noun
phrase 1 which is marked with wa and that of the main function that a wa
phrase displays in discourse.
Concerning the status of a noun phrase marked by wa, I will suggest
that we replace the categories "anaphoric" and "generic", which have been
ascribed to a wa marked noun phrase, with the notion "identifiable". As for
the discourse function of wa, I propose that "setting the scope for the pred
ication" is wa's main function, and I also suggest that one of its derivative
functions can be understood as "indicating multiple predications" along
with the well known functions of indicating a "negative scope", and a "con
trastive element".
1. DATA
The data used for this study consist of nine oral descriptions of lay-outs
of living quarters. Seven native speakers of Japanese gave descriptions of
their apartments, one her house, and one his dormitory room. The seven
apartment lay-out descriptions constitute the core data for the present dis
cussion. Although the other two, the house and dormitory room descrip-
108 SHOICHI IWASAKI
tions, follow the same general pattern in terms of the distribution of wa,
they are excluded from the initial discussion since they deal with a slightly
different physical pattern from apartment type living quarters.
A peculiarity of expository discourse must be noted here. According to
Longacre (1976:199-204), expository discourse refers to discourse which is
impersonal and atemporal, and which contains an abundance of "equative
and descriptive" clauses. For Japanese, an equative or descriptive clause
usually takes the shape [ N P - W A + Predicate] [See Hinds (this volume)].
Thus, from the outset, we anticipate a predominance of this type of con
struction in the data, and a concomitant lack of expectation for temporal
clauses.
Using these data I discuss first, in 2.1, the pragmatic characteristics of
noun phrases with wa, and then in 2.2, the discourse function of the particle
wa.
2. DISCUSSION
2.1. Pragmatic Status of the wa marked phrase
2.1.1. Identifiability
Kuno (1972, 1973) claims that the pragmatic status of the wa marked
phrase can be characterized as "anaphoric" or "generic". This section chal
lenges this characterization, and suggests that it be replaced with the more
appropriate notion "identifiability".
That "anaphoricity" is not an appropriate term to describe wa marked
noun phrases is observed in the following example. (1) is taken from a TV
show, Shinkon-san Irasshai "Welcome, Newlyweds". The parentheses indi
cate a segment which could not be transcribed accurately. After the hus
band and wife announce their names, the male interviewer, M, continues.
F is the female interviewer.
(1) M: goshujin nakanaka kanroku ( ) kono megane ga
husband quite dignity these glasses SB
mata yoroshii naa
also good EX
F: uun soo desu nee
mm so COP EX
M: oshigoto wa?
job TP
IDENTIFIABILITY, SCOPE-SETTING, AND THE PARTICLE WA 109
anaphoric and eligible for being marked with wa. We also understand,
though Kuno does not discusses this, that a referent and concept can be
registered in the temporary section through a "frame" in the sense of
Fillmore (see 2.1.3.).
Concepts of a generic and unique nature are stored in the perma
nent section of the registry. They need not be introduced into discourse
before noun phrases representing them can take wa (Hinds 1976:29).
Unique referents are identifiable by definition. Generic concepts are also
identifiable in that they refer to a class which is discriminated from all other
classes of the same level of categorization (Rosch 1978). Note again that
"generic and unique", concepts whose identities can always be found out
side the discourse (i.e., "homophoric" in Halliday and Hasan's term
(1976:71-3)), are very different in nature from "anaphoricity", a concept
operating discourse internally (i.e., Halliday and Hasan's "endophoric"
1976:33).
One final note about "identifiability" is in order. That is, this notion is
not relevant to nonreferential mentions, such as categorizing predicate
nominals and negative pronouns (Du Bois 1980:209-17). One case of non-
referential mention with wa is found in the present data, and this will sub
sequently be discussed.
To summarize, in this section it is suggested that the most relevant
pragmatic concept that characterizes a noun phrase marked with wa is
"identifiability". The referent of such noun phrases must be identifiable
before they can take wa marking. The present data contain some noun
phrases with wa which are neither "anaphoric" nor "generic/unique" but
nevertheless are "identifiable" through a different source (i.e., "frame"). In
the following two sections, we will see exactly how a referent becomes iden
tifiable when it is anaphoric and when it is not anaphoric. Since there are no
generic or unique references with wa in the data, the discussion will concen
trate on non-generic, non-unique referents.
D
#of Form of # of Post-
Referent NP-wa Referent Previous NP-wa
(Speaker) Mention Mention Clauses
I. MAJOR PARTS
a) Apartment Building
sono apaato wa 1 - 3
that apt.bldg. (1)
sono apaato tte 2 NP-wa 4
iu no wa (1)
thing called apt. bldg.
apaato no 1 3
birudingu wa (3)
apt. bldg.
ryoo wa 3 NP-ni 5
dormitory (4) NP in predicate
Hale Wainani wa 2 NP in modifier 1
(name of bldg.) (5)
b) Apartment Unit
watashі 2 [NP-o]
apaato wa (1)
my apt.
sono apaato ni wa 3 [NP-o]
in that apt. (1) NP-wa
watashi-tachi no 4 [NP-o] 0
heya ni wa (1) NP-wa (false start)
in our room NP-wa
watashi wa 2 2
I (=my room) (3) [NP-o]
apaato wa 2
apt. unit (3) NP-wa
sangai no heya wa 2
room on the NP-o
3rd floor (4)
heya wa 2 NP in predicate
room (5)
112 SHOICHI IWASAKI
D
#of Form of # of Post-
Referent NP-wa Referent Previous NP-wa
(Speaker) Mention Mention Clauses
soko wa 2 [NP-o] 3
there (9)
(=apt. unit)
c) Living Room
ribingu ruumu 2 NP in predicate 3
tte iu no wa(1)
thing called
living room
ribingu ruumu 2 NP-ni 4
ni wa (2)
in the living room
ribingu ruumu wa 3 NP-ga 2
living room (3) NP in predicate
* ribingu ruumu 3 NP(no-)-ni 1
ni wa* (5) [NP-ni-wa]
in the living room
ribingu ruumu wa 3 NP-ga 2
living room (7) NP-ni
ribingu ruumu 2 NP(to-)-ga 1
ni wa (9) (post posed)
in the living room
d) Bedroom
shinshitsu wa 2 NP(to-) in pred. 2
bedroom (1)
beddoruumu ni wa 2 NP in predicate 1
in bedroom (2)
shinshitsu to 2 NP-ga 2
iu no wa(4)
thing called bedroom
futatsu no NP in predicate 1
beddoruumu wa (5) NP-ga
two bedrooms
beddoruumu wa NP-ga 0
bedroom (7) NP-ga (false start)
NP in modifier
IDENTIFIABILITY, SCOPE-SETTING, AND THE PARTICLE W A 113
D
#of Form of # of Post-
Referent NP-wa Referent Previous NP-wa
(Speaker) Mention Mention Clauses
beddoruumu wa 1 1
bedroom (9)
beddoruumu wa 5 NP-WA 1
bedroom (9) NP-gfl
NP-ga
NP-ga
e) Bathroom
basuruumu wa 2 NP(to-) in predicate 2
bathroom (1)
basuruumu (to-) 1 1
tte iu no wa
thing called bathroom
f) Kitchen
*kitchin ni wa* 4 NP-ga
in the kitchen (3) NP in predicate
[NP-ni-wa]
*kitchin wa* 3 NP(to-)-ga
kitchen (4) [NP-wa]
*kitchin ni wa* 6 NP(to-)-ga
in the kitchen (4) [NP-wa]
NP-wa
NP in predicate
[NP-ni-wa]
*kitchin wa* NP-gfl
kitchen (5) NP(no-)-ni
NP(no-)-ni
[NP-wa]
daidokoro ni wa 2
in the kitchen (7) NP-gfl
(-to) kitchin tte 2
iu no wa (9) NP-gfl
(-and) thing called
kitchen
114 SHOICHI IWASAKI
D
# of Form of # of Post-
Referent NP-wa Referent Previous NP-wa
(Speaker) Mention Mention Clauses
g) Upper Room
nikai ni wa 1 2
in the upper (4)
room
II. MINOR PARTS AND SUPER-STRUCTURE
h) Minor Parts
1) Wall
kabe ni wa 1 - 2
on the wall (2)
kabe ni wa 1 - 1
on the wall (4)
kabe ni wa 1 - 1
on the wall (7)
Table
teeburu wa 3 NP-to 2
table (3) NP(to-)-ga
The Rest
ato wa 1 - 1
rest (of wall) (2)
ato wa 1 2
rest (of things
in the kitchen) (3)
ato wa 1 - 1
rest (of bedroom) (5)
Deixis
koko ni wa 1 2
here (in the
living room) (1)
soko ni wa 2 NP-ga 1
there (shelf
in kitchen) (7)
sore wa 2 NP-ga 1
that(oven)(7)
sore wa 2 NP-ga 1
that (mat) (7)
IDENTIFIABILITY, SCOPE-SETTING, AND THE PARTICLE WA 115
D
# of Form of # of Post-
Referent NP-wa Referent Previous NP-wa
(Speaker) Mention Mention Clauses
5) Others
zairyoo wa 1 - 1
material (1) - (post posed)
kabe to kauchi no 1 1
aida wa
between wall
and couch (3)
nagashi ni wa 1 1
at the sink (4)
shinku no ue no 1 1
tokoro wa
place above the sink (5)
isu wa 1 - 1
chair (5)
yuka ni wa 1 1
on the floor (7)
kagu wa 1 3
furniture (7)
i) Super-structure
zentai wa 1 1
whole
(apartment) (7)
heya-kazu wa 1 3
the number of
rooms (7)
III. REFERENTS WHICH DO NOT DIRECTLY BELONG TO APARTMENT
j) Residents
watashi-tachi wa 3 NP in modifier 3
we (1) NP in modifier
watashi wa 1 1
1(4)
watashi-tachi wa 1 1
we (7)
watashi-tachi
116 SHOICHI IWASAKI
D
# of Form of # of Post-
Referent NP-wa Referent Previous NP-wa
(Speaker) Mention Mention Clauses
no baai wa
our case (9)
watashi no
ruumumeeto wa NP-ga
my roommate (7)
kanojo wa NP-ga
she (7) NP-wa
NP in modifier
k) Contrastive Parts
hitotsu wa
one (7)
mieru tokoro wa
visible part (7)
ue no hoo wa
upper part (7)
1) Temporal Adverbials
wa
previously (4)
ima wa
presently (4)
m) Others
yo-nin gurai
made wa
up to about
four people (1)
shita ni
aru no yori wa
than the one
below (4)
dainingu teeburu
to wa NP-ga
besides the NP(no-)-ni
dining table (5)
IDENTIFIABILITY, SCOPE-SETTING, AND THE PARTICLE WA 117
the form of the previous mention of the same referent and the number of
mention are indicated. In particular, Column A shows the referents of wa-
marked phrases, and Column lists their actual surface form. (A wa
phrase between two asterisks in Column means that this phrase is first
said by the interviewer, not by the interviewee). Column shows how
many times the referent of the wa marked phrase has been mentioned. The
number 1 means that the wa marked phrase is the first instance in which the
referent is mentioned. The number 2 means that the referent is mentioned
for the second time in the wa phrase. Types of prior mention are shown in
Column D (A wa phrase between brackets in Column D indicates the inter
viewer's utterance). Parentheses are employed in this column to abbreviate
the actual stretch of a longer noun phrase and so highlight the noun phrase
in question. That is, the phrase
(3) beddoruumu to kitchin ga arimasu
bedroom and kitchen SB exist
is abbreviated to NP (to-) ga arimasu to highlight the first noun phrase, i.e.,
bedroom, and "(-to) NP ga arimasu" to highlight the second noun phrase,
i.e., kitchen. The particles which appear in this column beside wa are: ga
(subject marker), (direct object marker), ni (locative marker), and to
("and"). Column E shows how many clauses follow each instance of a wa
marked phrase. Discussion of this column is presented in 2.2.
Three major referent types are posited (I, II, and III). Each referent
type consists of a number of referent headings; seven headings for I (a-g),
two for II (h-i), and four for HI (j-m). Referent type I consists of the major
components of an apartment including the building itself. These are; (a)
apartment building, (b) apartment unit, (c) living room, (d) bedroom, (e)
bathroom, (f) kitchen, and (g) second floor. Referent type II consists of:
(h) minor parts (wall, table, sink, etc.) and (i) super-concepts (number of
rooms, and the shape of a whole apartment). Referent type III is a mixture
of referents which do not directly belong to an apartment: (j) people (resi
dents), (k) temporal adverbials, (1) contrastive parts, and (m) comparative
phrases.
As shown in Table 1, most noun phrases of type I, i.e., major compo
nents of the apartment, are anaphoric. A 2 or a larger number in Col
umn indicates that the noun phrase in question is anaphoric. Column D
shows the first mention. Table 2 is a summary of the first mentioned form.
118 SHOICHI IWASAKI
the linguistic provisions which name and describe the categories and rela
tions found in schemata. Once a particular frame is evoked by some linguis
tic means, for example, by mentioning some nouns or verbs in a sentence,
the speaker and the hearer expect that certain relevant concepts and actions
can be used for further construction and interpretation of text (Fillmore
1977:127).
The Japanese equivalent to initial definite marking of noun phrases in
English is initial wa marking. The next text is an example from Hinds
(1976a:36).
(8) senshuu doitsu-sei no sugoi kuruma katta kedo
last-week German-made LK great car bought but
enjin wa nihon-sei datta yo.
engine TP Japan-made COP EX
Last week I bought a great German car, but the engine is made in
Japan.
The frame for this text, the "car" frame, is evoked by the first clause.
Since all cars include engines, the engine is marked with wa. If an item is
not in the "car1' frame (e.g., a wireless telephone as a special feature in a
car), it must be introduced into the discourse explicitly, for example with ga
before it can be marked with wa.
Apartment lay-out descriptions are based on an "apartment" frame.
Concepts which can be inferred from this frame, expressions such as sono
apaato "that apartment building", beddoruumu "bedroom", can be marked
with wa on first mention. We have observed earlier, however, that despite
the fact that people can do this, these noun phrases are typically introduced
through a noun phrase marked by other particles.
It is not clear exactly how a frame gets activated, and it is beyond the
scope of this paper to discuss this matter in detail. I will simply present sev
eral cases to illustrate the complexities of frames. In some cases a noun
phrase with wa functions as a frame opener. That is, a noun phrase with wa
activates a frame, and consequently elements in that frame can be realized
on first occurrence as a noun phrase with wa. One such example is pre
sented in (9).
(9) 16: sorekara ribingu ruumu wa, eeto
and living room TP umm
soo desu ne, "director chair" ga
"let me see" SB
IDENTIFI ABILITY, SCOPE-SETTING, AND THE PARTICLE WA 123
hitotsu atte
one exist:GER
22: teeburu wa
table TP
23: a, watashitachi wa binboo gakusei desu kara ne
oh we TP poor student COP so EX
24: kaenai node
cannot-buy so
25: koo hako o tsumikasanete
this way box DO pile-up:GER
26: soko ni koo mieru tokoro ni wa nihon
there LC this-way visible place LC TP Japan
no chiyogami o hatte
LK "chiyo" paper DO paste:GER
27: de, sono ue no hoo ni wa sudare o,
and that upper LK side LC TP bamboo-blind DO
sudare , koo oite
bamboo-blind DO this-way put:GER
28: teeburu ni shite
table RS make:GER
29: tsukatteiru n desu kedo ne
using NOM COP but EX
(Speaker 7)
And the living room, umm, let me see, has one director chair
The table.
Oh, since we are poor students,
We can't buy one, so
We put boxes on top of each other.
We pasted "chiyo" paper on the visible sides.
And we placed a bamboo blind on the upper side.
As a table,
we use it.
124 SHOICHI IW ASAKI
ously not all identifiable noun phrases are marked with wa. The clue to the
speaker's motivation, or the function of wa, is found in the wa phrases in
(m). The items in (m) present an important characteristic of wa. These are
adverbial phrases of a special kind, i.e., adverbials of comparison which
indicate "range" (up to four people), and "points of reference" (compared
to the one on the first floor; from a dining table). These examples present
problems for identifying the function of wa as "thematic" or "contrastive".
These adverbial phrases cannot be "thematic" in any definition of the term.
They are not contrastive elements either in a strict sense since, while a part
of these adverbial phrases (e.g., shita ni aru no "the one in the downstairs")
might be called contrastive, the whole phrase (e.g., shita ni aru no yori
"rather than the one in the downstairs") cannot. I will suggest, then that the
unifying function of wa can be stated as "setting the scope for predication".
2.1.5. Summary.
This section has investigated the pragmatic properties of wa-marked
phrases and has suggested that "identifiability" should replace the notions
of "anaphoricity", "genericness", and "uniqueness" of a referent for a noun
phrase to be marked with wa. The identifiability condition is not relevant
for a nonreferential noun phrase. Since almost all noun phrases in the data
are specific, the mechanisms by which identifiability is established for such
noun phrase referents were considered: a noun phrase referent will poten
tially become identifiable by its anaphoricity (i.e., the noun phrase referent
has been mentioned explicitly in discourse), or through a "frame" (i.e., a
noun phrase referent is an element in a frame which has been activated). In
some cases a frame is evoked by a wo-marked phrase, but at other times it
is evoked in a more subtle way. Finally the function of wa was hinted at
when dealing with some adverbial phrases of comparison.
is nonreferential (i.e., it does not refer to any specific four people). The
function of scope setting, however, applies equally regardless of the status
of such noun phrases. Thus, the postpositional phrase in (15) indicates
"range" (up to four people), and those in (16) and (17) indicate "points of
reference" (compared to the one on the first floor; from a dining table),
which demarcate the boundaries for the following predication. (12) is
interesting, though not a special case at all, since it contains two instances
of wa phrases. It is understood that: "X is fairly spacious" is true only
within the specification made by the wa marked postpositional phrase,
"compared to the one in downstairs". "X is fairly spacious compared to the
one downstairs" is in turn understood to be true when it is applied to "the
second floor bedroom" which is marked with wa.
I have shown that the scope setting function of wa is useful in explain
ing variously described functions such as markers for negative scope and
contrastive elements. This function also explains what Chafe (1976) calls
"Topic, Chinese style". He says, "the topic sets a spatial, temporal, or indi
vidual framework within which the main predication holds."
We can modify this statement and define the "scope setting" function
of wa as follows.
The particle wa sets a scope (or demarcates a domain) to which a predica
tion or predications are supplied.
This function cuts across the distinction between wa marked noun
phrases which are referential (identifiable or nonidentifiable) and nonrefe
rential. It also applies to any elements besides noun phrases which come
before wa. Kuno 1973 notes that his "anaphoricity" and "genericness" con
dition does not apply to a noun phrase that represents a contrastive ele
ment. This observation can be rephrased in the present framework as fol
lows. If a noun phrase is non-identifiable, it is unlikely to be predicated
because it is pragmatically undesirable to talk about an entity which a
hearer (and sometimes also the speaker) cannot identify. Therefore the so-
called "thematic" interpretation cannot be obtained for non-identifiable
noun phrases and the other option, the "contrastive" interpretation in
Kuno's framework, must be taken. What we are asserting then is that in
both cases wa sets the scope and whether or not the wa marked phrase is
interpreted as a "topic"-like entity depends on pragmatic considerations.
Once the scope is set, the predication is supplied. Yet the scope so set
might be filled with more than one predication. Using Mikami's locution,
IDENTIFIABILITY, SCOPE-SETTING, AND THE PARTICLE WA 131
2.2.2. Multi-predication
Once we identify the scope-setting function of wa as the main function,
we can understand its derivative functions. We have noted already the
marking of negative scope, that of contrastive element, and that of point of
reference in a comparison clause, etc. These are all specific instances of
"scope setting".
The speaker can also utilize this function when, for any reason, he/she
wants to elaborate on some referent or concept. In such an instance, the wa
marked material must be a nominal on the higher scale of noun categorial-
ity which is defined as the linguistic material which refers to main partici
pants of the discourse (Hopper and Thompson 1984). This excludes
nonidentifiable and nonreferential noun phrases. That is, one cannot elabo
rate on material which does not refer to any object or whose identity is not
(yet) known. This mechanism of scope-setting of the main participants for
the purpose of predication is usually known as the "topic marking" or
"theme marking" function of wa. There is no objection to calling it such,
but it must be emphasized that this is just one of the derivative functions
which are made possible by the main function of "scope-setting". Topicali-
zation or thematization may be characterized with the notion of "target of
predication". If a clause starts with a wa-marked noun phrase which is iden
tifiable, it is possible to continue talking about it.
Although wα-marked phrases in the present data are lower on the topi
cality scale if topicality is understood as something that is higher on the ani-
macy hierarchy (Comrie 1981:191-2), or as a semantic agent (Givón
1984:139ff), some still secure the identity of referent as the target of predi
cation with the force of setting the scope and are predicated with more
than one clause.13 This suggests that the notion topic must be understood as
a product of the process of the making of actual discourses.
While the scope-setting function is considered omnipresent for a wa
marked phrase, the function of multi-predications is certainly limited. The
appearance of multi-predications is largely determined by nonlinguistic
considerations such as the goal of the speaker who produces the discourse.
132 SHOICHI IWASAKI
Though this point is well beyond the scope of the present paper we will see
in what follows that the particle wa but not other particles exhibits the pos
sibility of chaining of predicates.
Despite the low degree of topicality of wa phrases in the present data
according to the criteria mentioned earlier, some show long persistence in
the ensuing discourse. This is shown in Column E in Table 1. The numbers
in this column indicate how many predicates follow after a wa marked
phrase is mentioned.
Length of persistence of a wa marked phrase is measured as follows.14
When a wa marked phrase appears, its compatibility with the immediately
following clause is tested. If the wa phrase makes a coherent unit with the
immediately following clause, the wa phrase is said to persist to the next
clause, and these two clauses constitute a "joined unit". To show this oper
ation schematically, see (18) and (19). (18) represents a linear order in
which clauses may appear, and (19) is an analysis of a joined unit.
(18) X-WA clause 1, clause 2, ... clause n.
(19) X-WA clause 1
X-WA clause 2
ness of the structure of (20) with the wa phrase of (20). Observe (22):
(22) 2': (apaato no tatemono WA) ik-kai-me ga paakingu ni
natteimasu
The first level of the apartment building is for parking.
The third clause which follows (20) also can take the same wa phrase as
shown in (23).
(23) 3': (apaato no tatemono WA) і-kai kara ue ga,
2-floor from up SB
anoo, juutaku ni natteimasu
uhm living-space RS has-become
The second floor of the apartment building and above are liv
ing spaces.
Table 3 presents the arithmetic means of the number of clauses which
follow a wa phrase to form a joined unit. The actual number of both post
wa clauses and wa phrases are indicated in parentheses (there are 35 cases
of wa phrases and 81-post-wa clauses altogether in categories (a) through
(g))·
*The mean length of a joined unit is calculated by dividing the total number
of post predicates for each noun phrase type (indicated by the first figure in
parentheses) by the total number of noun phrases with the particle in ques
tion (indicated by the second figure in parentheses).
It is clear from this table that the wa marked noun phrase and a bare
noun phrase which includes wa ellipsis are the only cases in which
multi-predications are observed. Thus I conclude that it is wďs distinct
function to organize a bigger chunk of discourse while other particles
only organize a single clause unit. It is interesting that mo does not
appear with multi-predication although its affinity to wa has been suggested
earlier.
2.2.3. Summary.
In this section the function of wa and its effect in the discourse was
considered. The main function of wa is to "set the scope" for predication.
136 SHOICHI IWASAKI
3. CONCLUSION
In this paper instances of wa phrases in an actual discourse were
examined. This approach has certain advantages and shortcomings. One
shortcoming is the potential lack of generality. Since this study concerned
apartment lay-out descriptions, the findings might be challenged by
research on other types of discourse. That is, it might be shown that the
findings in this paper may be generalized across different genres of dis
course or that they are unique to expository discourse. The main advantage
of this approach is that it avoids any preconception that a researcher might
have. This is very important especially when dealing with such a controver
sial linguistic phenomenon such as the particle wa. If one starts with the
notion of "topic" or "theme" associated with this particle, he/she is in great
danger of losing sight of other functions that the particle might have, and
consequently miss the generalizations possible among these functions.
The function of "scope-setting", which I suggested as wa's main func
tion, has already been insightfully identified by Sakuma (1940:210-11).
However, it is a mistake to equate jojutsu no hanì no kakutei "demarcation
of scope for statement" with daimoku no settei "topic setting" because
"topic setting" is but one realization of the "demarcation of scope for state
ment". The scope might be demarcated for other purposes such as to indi
cate the range to which negation or comparison is applied.
Only after we recognize that "topic" or "theme" marking is one of the
realizations of wa's main function can we profitably investigate the nature
of "topic" or "theme" in Japanese. Here I only indicate one possible direc
tion that we might take for better understanding of "topic" or "theme" in
Japanese.
A possible parameter that wa-marked phrases can be categorized with is
that of "aboutness". When wa is used for marking the scope of negation,
IDENTIFI ABILITY, SCOPE-SETTING, A N D T H E P A R T I C L E WA Yìl
NOTES
1) Linguistic materials that can be marked with wa include noun phrases, postpositional
phrases, adverbial phrases, adjectives, and verbs. In the data examined for this chapter noun
phrases and locative postpositional phrases with ni appear quite frequently due to the nature of
the discourse.
2) Prince (1981) calls this type of discourse entity ''brand-new unanchored." See also Hinds
(this volume) for a discussion of this type of information status.
3) "Identifiabilit" is an alternative term for "definiteness", Chafe (1976) considers "iden-
tifiability" to be a more appropriate label for the concept, but continues to use "definiteness''
since it is the standard term in the linguistic literature. I chose the term '"identifiable" because of
its mnemonic nature.
4) Similar proposals are made by researchers in cognitive psychology (e.g., Minsky 1975) and
artificial intelligence (Norman 1973, Schank and Abelson 1977, etc.).
5) If a referent is mentioned more than twice before a wu-marked phrase, only the very first
mention is counted since our intention here is to see what strategies are available to introduce a
referent into discourse and not to see how an introduced referent changes before it finally
reaches the given wa phrase. However, the situation is more complicated than this since it is not
always the case that the first mention of a referent triggers the marking of wa on a noun phrase
with the same referent later in discourse when there are one or more intervening mentions of the
referent between the first and the latter mention with wa. If the progression is as follows, for
example:
(Referent.) -ga ... (Referent.) -ga ...
(Referent.) -ni ... (Referent ) -wa ...
It cannot be determined a priori which instance of referent mention is actually responsible
for the final wa marking. Sometimes it seems that an accumulation of mentions finally triggers
wa. However, this is a subjective observation and cannot be documented here. Thus I am con
tent with the decision to count the initial mentions only. Also, if a speaker uses wa for the same
referent more than once, only one such instance is counted in order to avoid counting the same
initial mention more than once.
6) The status of the referent in (g), "the upper split level" in an apartment, is even more
peripheral since it is not a regular feature of an apartment. Thus, the speaker must explicitly
mention this special feature of the apartment before she marks the noun phrase representing it
138 S H O I C H I IW ASAKI
with wa (see (25), line 8). Thus, nikai ni wa "on the second floor" is very different form the rest
of referents in I, and it could be argued that it belongs to II. Yet since "the upper level" is a
larger spatial unit than those in II, I include it in group I.
7) As it is presented, it could be argued that "director chair" has activated the "table" frame
since there is a strong association between the two concepts. However, between lines 16 and 22,
not shown here, there are two noun phrases that are marked with wa, "floor" and "mat". There
fore, I take the larger frame of "living room" rather than that of "chair" as the frame activator.
8) The wa phrases in this text are not included in Table 1 since it deals with a "house" frame
which is slightly different from an "apartment" frame. It is interesting to note that hiatari "expo
sure to the sun" in line 2 is marked with wa on its first mention. This is possible because "how
much light a house can get" is one of the most important concerns for Japanese when they
choose a house.
9) This was confirmed in a follow-up interview with Speaker 8.
10) A similar example can be observed in the next text which is the opening of an interview
session. This is taken from Hinds 1982.
(i) Α-l: , mazu anoo, onamae kara,
um first uhm name from
okikishitai n desu kedomo ne
want-to-ask NOM COP but EX
B-2: yamauchi sumi desu
COP
A-3: yamauchi sumi san ne
Ms EX
A-4: , nenrei wa okiki shinai tte iu
um age TP ask NEG QT say
yakusoku na n de
promise LK NOM COP:GER
A-l: Um, first I"d like to start with your name
B-2: It's Sumi Yamauchi.
A-3: Ms. Sumi Yamauchi, right?
A-4: Well, I promised I wouldn't ask your age so...
Since information about age is considered to be essential in this type of interview, the inter
viewer must feel it necessary to indicate that he has not forgotten about this important informa
tion. It should be noted, however, that nenrei "age" is clearly identifiable, that is, it refers to the
interviewee's age.
11) Personal pronouns cannot be easily distinguished from nouns grammatically in Japanese
since they share many of the same structural properties. For example:
Modification: (kono oloko vs. kono watashi)
this man this I
Genitive: (sensei no hon vs. watashi no hon)
teacher GN book I GN book
Plural: (Yamada-san-tachi vs. watashi-tachi)
Mr. and others I and others
I D E N T I F I A B I L I T Y , SCOPE-SETTING, A N D T H E P A R T I C L E WA 139
Yet functionally, nouns are different from pronouns in that the latter are "shifters" (Jakobsen
1971).
12) In Iwasaki 1984, I stated that wa functions to "limit the scope for a predication" and to
"signal multi-predication". But now I consider "scope-limiting" to be the main function and
"signaling of multi-predication" as one of its derivative functions.
13) Securing the identity of a referent and predicating that identity can be stated in terms of
"aboutness". That is, the predicate is "about" the referent which is represented with a noun with
wa. In this way the present study supports with empirical data Kuno's assumption concerning
the "aboutness" of wa. For some readers, it might be easier to accept the term, "aboutness", for
a wa-marked item in a nominal clause, i.e., a clause which ends with a nominal and copula as
(ii), than in a verbal clause, i.e., one which ends with a verb as (iii). Thus between "John's" in
(ii) and (iii) below, the first "John" is easier to be understand as the topic/theme, i.e, this sen
tence is "about" "John". This is due to the fact that the second "John" is the agent and this
semantic role is competing with the functional notion of topic/theme. Yet I still interpret both
instances of "John" as the functional target of the predication.
(ii) jon wa gakusei da.
John TP student COP
John is a student.
(iii) jon wa hon yondeiru.
John TP book DO reading
John is reading a book.
14) My use of the term "persistence of a referent in discourse" is slightly differently than
Givón 1983:15 who measures persistence of a topic/participant in terms of "an uninterrupted
presence as a semantic argument of the clause, an argument of whatever role and marked by
whatever grammatical means." "Persistence" as used here is closely related to Mikami's notion
of "period crossing" and its elaboration by Kuno (1979).
15) Post ga clauses are counted in the same way as post wa clauses. That is, when a ga phrase
appears, it is added to the next clause to see if the string of words make sense. If it does, these
two clauses make up a joined unit. This precludes the possibility of a joined unit when the first
clause contains a ga phrase and the second contains the same phrase with any particle. Most cru
cially when two clauses have noun phrases with the same referent and they are marked with ga
in the first clause and with wa in the next, they do not constitute a joined unit but are two sepa
rate clauses. Even if the other option is taken (i.e., if we continue to count clauses when the sec
ond clause has an overt noun phrase which has the same referent of the ga marked phrase), the
result will not be affected much since out of 150 cases of ga phrases, there are only three cases
in which a ga phrase is immediately followed by another coreferential noun phrase in the
immediately following clause.
REFERENCES
S.-Y. KURODA
University of California, San Diego
The following paper, except for minor additions and stylistic improve
ments, was written about ten years ago, but has never been published. The
purpose of the paper was, as mentioned in the first section, to present a
case study, on the basis of a very limited, but hence well-defined scope, to
show that the so-called topic wa functions to represent a "double"-judg-
ment. The notion of "double"-judgment is derived from the Brentano-
Marty theory of judgment.
I now believe that the Brentano-Marty conception of double-judg-
ment, which underlay the original paper, must be modified for our pur
pose. Brentano and Marty claimed that a double judgment (a categorical
judgment) involves the recognition of the subject, which is a thetic judg
ment, but I now maintain that this analysis is not sufficient to characterize
the categorical judgment. What is essential for the categorical judgment is
the apprehension of substance. I presented this modifed view at the col
loquium on Anton Marty's philosophy and theory of language held at
Freiburg, Switzerland, in December, 1985.
The analysis presented below in fact fits better with this new interpre
tation of the notion of double judgment (or, categorical judgment) and I
would like to refer the reader to my colloquium paper, "The categorical
and the thetic judgment reconsidered," which will appear in K. Mulligan
ed. Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics: the Philosophy and Theory of Lan
guage of Anton Marty.*
2. In the following sections I shall study the stylistic effect of wa, or that
of the lack of it, in the subject position of a quotative verb in passages from
Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner in Japanese translation. By a quotative
verb I mean here a verb whose object complement is a direct quotation.
Since I assume most readers are not familiar with Japanese I will not
quote our examples in Japanese. I will put in square brackets those subjects
of quotative verbs that are translated by wa-phrases in our Japanese texts
and in braces those subjects that are translated by ga-phrases. For example,
if we have '"—," said [John]' in our English texts, we have '"—," to John-
wa itta as the Japanese translation, and if we have '"—," said {John}' we
have '"—," to John ga itta' in Japenese translation.
Let it be remembered that the interpretations of the texts given below
are interpretations of the Japanese texts I use. Whether they are adequate
interpretations of the original texts, or to what extent and in what sense
they are so, is not our present concern.
3. The first passage we analyze is from Leo Tolstoi's War and Peace, Book
II, Chapter 15. Nicolai Rostov, staying in Moscow on leave from his regi
ment is drawn one day into a card game with Dolokhov, who has recently
proposed marriage to Sonya, Nicolai's cousin, and has been rejected.
Nicolai is losing 43,000 rubles. Sonya loves Nicolai, and he knows it; he
doesn't know how he feels about her. In his desperate mood he has decided
to play until the score reached forty-three thousand, forty-three being the
sum of his and Sonya's ages. The following scene is when Nicolai, fallen to
an unwonted bottom of gloom from a joyous life in Moscow, comes home
to find the usual happy gathering of the family.
To say "Tomorrow" and maintain a dignified tone was not difficult,
but to go home alone, to see his sisters, brother, mother, and father, to
confess and ask for money he had no right to after giving his word of
honor, was terrible.
SO-CALLED TOPIC WA IN TOLSTOI, LAWRENCE AND FAULKNER 145
At home they had not yet gone to bed. The young people, after com
ing home from the theater, had had supper and were grouped around the
clavichord. As soon as Nikolai entered the ballroom, he was enveloped in
that poetic atmosphere of love that prevailed in the house that winter and
now, after Dolokhov's proposal and Vogeľs ball, seemed to have grown
heavier around Sonya and Natasha, like the air before a thunderstorm.
Sonya and Natasha, looking pretty and conscious of it, in the light blue
dresses they had worn to the theater, were standing by the clavichord,
happy and smiling. Vera was playing chess with Shinshin in the drawing
room. The old Countess, waiting for her son and her husband to come
home, was playing patience with an old gentlewoman who lived in their
house. Denisov, with sparking eyes and ruffled hair, sat at the clavichord,
one leg flung out behind him, striking chords with his short fingers and rol
ling his eyes as he sang in a small, husky, but true voice, a poem of his own
composition called "The Enchantress," to which he was trying to fit music.
"Oh, tell me, enchantwess, what power is this,
Dwawing me to my forsaken lyre?
My fingers stwumming the stwings in bliss,
Setting my heart on fire"
he sang in passionate tones, his black agate eyes flashing at the frightened
but delighted Natasha.
"Beautiful! Wonderful!" cried [Natasha].
"Another verse," [she] said, not noticing Nikolai.
"Everything's still the same with them," thought [Nikolai], glancing
into the drawing room, where he saw Vera and his mother and the old
lady.
"Ah! Here's Nikolenka!" exclaimed [Natasha], running to him.
"Is Papa home?" [he] asked.
"I'm so glad you've come!" cried [Natasha], not answering his ques
tion. "We're having such fun!
Vasily Dmitrich is staying on another day for my sake!
Did you know!"
"No, Papa is not back yet," said {Sonya}.
"Koko, are you back? Come here, darling," called the old {Countess}
from the drawing room.
Nikolai went to his mother, kissed her hand, and without saying a
word sat down at her table and watched her hands as she laid out the cards.
From the ballroom came the sound of laughter and merry voices trying to
persuade Natasha to sing.
"All wight, all wight!" cried [Denisov]. "It's no good making excuses
now! It's your turn to sing the Barcawolle — I entweat you!"
The Countess glanced at her silent son.
"What is the matter?" [she] asked.
"Oh, nothing," [he] replied, as though sick of being continually asked
the same question. "Will Papa be home soon?"
"I expect so."
146 S.-Y. KURODA
Nicolai's point of view. (I grant, however, the possibility that the sentence
T h e Countess glanced at her silent son' can be interpreted as representing
the Countess' point of view, exclusively, or in addition to Nicolai's.) This is
the simplest and most natural point of view structure we can impose on the
text. In the text there is no evidence, grammatical or otherwise, that forces
us to assume that the two sentences with quotative verbs represent, for
example, Natasha's point of view, i.e., a description of the verbal events as
they were reflected on Natasha's consciousness. Nor is it necessary to inter
pret these sentences as a description given independently of the points of
view of all the protagonists, in particular, of Nicolai's (i.e., description from
the narrator's point of view, if you are willing to use such terminology).
There is no reason to assume that the description of Nicolai's stream of con
sciousness is interrupted by these sentences. So long as they are interpreted
as representing Nicolai's point of view, then, the subjects of these sentences
(i.e., the subjects of the main verbs, ask and reply) are coreferential with
the subject of the point of view that the sentences represent.
Let us agree to say that a sentence (or, the subject of the main verb) is
reflexive of the point of view if the subject of the sentence is coreferential
with the subject of the point of view that the sentence represents.
The above two cases are, then, those where the subject of a sentence
with a quotative verb is (interpreted as) reflexive of the point of view. The
difference between them is that in the first case the main verb is a verb of
inner process like think, while in the latter the sentence in question repre
sents an external event.
We shall postpone further discussion of these two cases; let us now
consider the remaining case. All the remaining instances of quotative verbs
in our text are such that the subject of a quotative verb is not Nicolai, that
is, reflexive of the point of view. For the moment, then, we consider only
these instances of wa-phrases nonreflexive of the point of view.
3.3. From the interpretive analysis of the text given earlier, we may assume
that in our text if a quotative verb is accompanied by a wa-phrase nonrefle-
xive of the point of view, the subject of the verb (or, more exactly, its refe
rent) is an independent element of the content of Nicolai's consciousness,
independent of the event described by the quotative sentence itself.
For example, consider the sentence '"Beautiful! Wonderful!" cried
[Natasha].' There took place an event, Natasha's crying "Beautiful! Won
derful!" Natasha is a constituent of this event. This event was recorded in
148 S.-Y. KURODA
3.4. Let us now turn to the case in which the subject of a quotative verb is
reflexive of the point of view. We have two instances of this case in our
text: "'Is Papa home?" he asked,' and " O h , nothing," he replied.' (As
remarked earlier, however, the latter may also be interpreted from the
Countess's point of view.)
It is unreasonable to maintain that the same analysis holds here as in
the preceding case of wa-phrases nonreflexive of the point of view. For
150 S.-Y. KURODA
example, consider the first of our two sentences. One would not say that
Nicolai's consciousness had been directed towards himself when he asked
whether Papa was home in the same sense that it had been directed towards
Natasha when he perceived her exclaim "Ah! Here's Nikolenka!" and run
to him.
The wa attached to Nicolai in our present example, then, would have
to be justified on the basis of the fact that Nicolai is the subject of the point
of view. This fact is not itself a component of the world of the story, the
world the story is describing. Rather, it is a feature of the way the story is
told.
Yet, so long as this sentence ("'Is Papa home?" [he] asked.') is inter
preted as representing Nicolai's point of view, some degree of self-aware
ness on the part of Nicolai is implied. Wa attached to Nicolai in the sen
tence may not be replaced by ga so long as this sentence is understood as
reflexive of the point of view, i.e., so long as it is to be interpreted as repre
senting Nicolai's point of view. For this verbal act to be described from
Nicolai's point of view it seems unnecessary that Nicolai's consciousness
stands in a particular relationship with this event. If so, the meaning of wa
in a sentence reflexive of the point of view may also be justifiable internally
to the world of the story. Let us first consider this line of thought. We shall
return to the possible justification external with the world of the story in
3.5. after we consider the case with an inner process verb think.
At the least, Nicolai's asking whether Papa was home was a willful,
self-controlled act of Nicolai. This may be compared with the case in which
Nicolai was hypnotized and uttered the same question. In a description of
this hypothetical scene the same sentence "'Is Papa home?" [he] asked'
([he] being accompanied by wa) may appear. But in such a case Nicolai is
not the subject of the point of view and the sentence cannot be interpreted
as reflexive of the point of view. Nicolai, naturally, is not in the content of
Nicolai's consciousness. In contrast, with the wa-phrase reflexive of the
point of view the referent of the wa-phrase (Nicolai himself) may be said to
be an independent element of the content of Nicolai's consciousness, inde
pendent of the external event of his asking the question as reflected in his
consciousness, though not in the same way as in the preceding case of the
subject nonreflexive of the point of view.
In the present case, this independence of the self as an element of the
content of consciousness is purely a matter of, so to speak, the "logical"
structure of the content of consciousness. To the extent that he was aware
SO-CALLED TOPIC WA IN TOLSTOI, LAWRENCE AND FAULKNER 151
that he asked whether Papa was home, Nicolai was also aware of the self
whose willful act he was aware of. He was aware at least that his act of ask
ing the question was not incompatible with his will at the moment, and to
the extent he was aware of this he would have to be aware of his self inde
pendently of his awareness of this act; the self was contained as a compo
nent of the content of his present consciousness independently of the self as
an element of the event (his asking the question), which itself was a content
of his consciousness.
To elaborate on this point a little further, compare the scene in our text
with the following variation. Assume, instead of our sentence, we have '"Is
Papa home?" [he] asked unintentionally.' (In Japanese, "Otoosan wa ie
kai?" to kare wa omowazu kiita.) Nicolai was looking for Papa, for he had
to ask him for the money he had to pay Dolokhov. But Nicolai did not want
others to learn why he was looking for Papa. But in spite of himself he
asked Natasha: "'Is Papa home?'" This is our present imaginary setting of
the scene. Our sentence can still be interpreted as representing Nicolai's
point of view. He was aware of his own act, asking a question to Natasha.
At the same time, he was aware that this spontaneous act was contrary to
his will. The will of his self and his own act, of which he was aware, is
incompatible, and he was aware of this incompatibility. His awareness of
self, then, must be established independently of his awareness of his act in
the logical structure of his present consciousness.
In our original text, Nicolai's asking the question "Is Papa home?" was
a willful act by Nicolai, and he knew it. He knew that his act which was
externalized and of which he was aware was not incompatible with the will
of his self. I think our sentence '"Is Papa home?" he asked' means this, so
long as it is interpreted as reflexive of the point of view. We must admit,
then, that in the logical structure of the content of Nicolai's consciousness
his self is contained as a component independent of the event of his asking
a question to Natasha, which event is also a component of Nicolai's con
sciousness and of which Nicolai is contained as an element.
3.5. We now proceed to consider the case where the main verb is think.
This is the case where the fact that we are concerned with Nicolai's point of
view is most explicit. But precisely for that reason the stylistic function of
the wa attached to the subject of the main verb is quite different from the
previous cases. At the moment when this inner process of Nicolai's took
place, no one's consciousness may be said to be focused on Nicolai. One
152 S.-Y. KURODA
cannot even assume that Nicolai was conscious of himself in the same sense,
and to the same extent that we assume he was selfconscious in a situation
described earlier by a sentence reflexive of Nicolai's point of view, like that
discussed earlier ("'Is Papa home?" [he] aksed.') The sentence '"every
thing's still the same with them" thought [Nicolai]' does not imply that this
psychological act is a willful act of Nicolai. That everything is still the same
with them is the content of Nicolai's consciousness, but our sentence does
not imply that he is reflecting on his own thought (though of course is not
contradictory with the conclusion), nor does it imply that this content of
consciousness has any interaction with other components of Nicolai's con
sciousness.
A sentence of this kind represents no one's act of judging, and one can
not justify the use of wa here in a way internal to the world of the story. A
communicational theory of narration would here assume that it is an omnis
cient narrator who is perceiving and judging on an inner process of Nicolai.
Within such a conception one might justify the use of the wa attached to
Nicolai, the subject of the verb think, in analogy with the wa attached to
Natasha in the sentences that represent Nicolai's point of view. The omnis
cient narrator's consciousness has been centered around Nicolai. I argued
against setting up such an enigmatic creature as an omniscient narrator in
my earlier papers. 2
In contrast, I assume simply that the function of a sentence such as
'"Everything's still the same with them", Nicolai thought' is to create in the
reader's mind a meaning and simultaneously a section of the imaginary
world with which it is referentially interpreted. With this conception of nar
ration, only with respect to the reader's consciousness could one justify the
role of wa attached to the subject of a verb of inner process.
It is worthy of note that the two wďs in our text attached to the subject
of think, the complement of which represents the point of view of its refe
rent, cannot be replaced by ga. For example, it is impossible to replace the
wa attached to the Nicolai in '"Everything's still the same with them",
Nicolai thought' by ga. In contrast, the wďs attached to Natasha as the sub
jects of quotative verbs, subjects noncoreferential with the point of view,
may be replaced by ga in our texts, of course with certain changes in stylis
tic effect (i.e., changes in meaning). We shall return to the effect of such
replacement shortly. The impossibility of replacement of the wa attached to
Nicolai as the subject of think in our text may be taken as an indication that
an inner event of Nicolai's thinking, such a process internal to Nicolai's con-
SO-CALLED TOPIC WA IN TOLSTOI, LAWRENCE AND FAULKNER 153
sciousness, may not enter the reader's consciousness in the way an external
event, for example, Sonya's saying "No, papa is not back yet," may enter
(or may be imagined to enter) a protagonist's consciousness (for example,
Nicolai's), or the reader's consciousness, with the help of imagination.
Perhaps an inner element may not constitute a selfcontained element, as an
image or an understanding in the reader's consciousness in the way an
external event may (or may be imagined to) in a protagonist's, and through
the faculty of imagination, in the reader's, consciousness.
It is indeed a simple fact that the reader cannot imagine perceiving the
inner event of Nicolai's thinking such and such, nor can he imagine identify
ing himself with anyone perceiving this inner event (except by evoking the
notion of an omniscient narrator who has the superhuman faculty of
observing an inner event directly). Note that to imagine identifying our
selves with Nicolai will not do. For, with our example, Nicolai himself may
not necessarily be said to have been aware that he was thinking "everything
is still the same with them" in a way he was aware of Natasha's crying
"Beautiful! Wonderful!" or Sonya's saying "No, Papa is not back yet," even
though he was certainly aware that everything was still the same with them.
Nonetheless, our sentence creates in the reader's consciousness the
understanding that an inner event of thinking that everything was still the
same with them took place in Nicolai's consciousness; the reader is made
aware that Nicolai thought so. Representing an inner event of thinking
requires a two-place predicate, one argument representing the subject of
consciousness in which this inner process takes place and the other repre
senting the content of the consciousness created by this process. Nicolai is
in our consciousness as an argument fulfilling this two-place predicate when
we obtain this understanding. But at the same time Nicolai is in our con
sciousness as the subject of the point of view for this sentence, as the locus
of this inner process, which process we do not imagine perceiving directly
but whose effect on Nicolai's consciousness we are made aware of, as a
result of our empathy with Nicolai.
Thus, the meaning of wa attached to Nicolai as the subject of the verb
think must be justified externally with respect to the story, or in other
words, with respect to how the reader's consciousness is to be related to the
world of the story.
The same external interpretation may also be assumed for the wa's
which are attached to the subjects reflexive of the point of view. What
makes this case different from the case with the verb think is that in this
154 S.-Y. KURODA
case the subject of the point of view himself (in our example, Nicolai) in
addition perceives that he himself is a component, in fact a willful actor, in
the event described by the sentence in question. Thus, we may also talk
about the relationship of Nicolai as the subject of consciousness that per
ceives this event and Nicolai as an actor in the same event.
3.6. If our preceding argument is basically correct, then, we have the fol
lowing generalization. We have three cases of wa-phrases as the subjects of
quotative verbs in our text. First, nonreflexive of the point of view; second,
reflexive of the point of view; and finally, as a locus of consciousness. In
each of these cases the existence of the referent of the wa-phrase can be jus
tified in the consciousness of the subject of the point of view or of the
reader independently of (as well as in addition to) the fact that it is an argu
ment of the predicate represented by the main verb and as such is also an
element of the content of the understanding consciousness. In the first case,
one might even be allowed to say that the referent of the wα-phrase is
established as an element of the consciousness as a focal point of the subject
of the point of view's attention before it obtains another qualification of
existence as an argument of the main verb, i.e., as an element of an event
which is perceived by the subject of the point of view. But this presumed
temporal order in which the referent of a wa-phrase comes to get doubly
qualified as a component of a consciousness is not essential for the generali
zation we are now concerned with. What is crucial is the uniformity in the
"logical" structures, so to speak, of the consciousness whose state the sen
tence is related to in each case (i.e., in our preceding examples, Nicolai's in
the first and the second case, and the reader's in the third case). The recog
nition of the existence of the referent of the wa-phrase is independent of the
judgment that the event described by the predicate represented by the main
verb takes place. We would conclude that in all the three cases a sentence
with a wa-phrase conforms to the structural characteristic of the Brentano-
Marty concept of categorical judgment as a "double"-judgment.
It might be instructive to conduct some gedanken experiments by try
ing to replace the wďs in our text by ga. We can repace all the wďs attached
to the subjects of quotative verbs noncoreferential with the subject of the
point of view, Nicolai. The passage as a whole can still be considered as
representing Nicolai's point of view. But one might say the impression of
the passage is much "drier" than before. Nicolai's consciousness does not
particularly seem to be centered around any person or to be responding to
SO-CALLED TOPIC WA IN TOLSTOI, LAWRENCE AND FAULKNER 155
4. Our second example is from D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Part
II, Chapter VII. This scene with a son and a lover should need no introduc
tion.
She wanted to show him a certain wild-rose bush she had discovered.
She knew it was wonderful. And yet, till he had seen it, she felt it had not
come into her soul. Only he could make it her own, immortal. She was dis
satisfied.
Dew was already on the paths. In the old oak-wood a mist was rising,
and he hesitated, wondering whether one whiteness were a strand of fog or
only campionflowers pallid in a cloud.
By the time they came to the pine-trees Miriam was getting very eager
and very tense. Her bush might be gone. She might not be able to find it;
and she wanted it so much. Almost passionately she wanted to be with him
when he stood before the flowers. They were going to have a communion
together — something that thrilled her, something holy. He was walking
beside her in silence. They were very near to each other. She trembled,
and he listened, vaguely anxious.
Coming to the edge of the wood, they saw the sky in front, like
mother-of-pearl, and the earth growing dark. Somewhere on the outer-
156 S.-Y. KURODA
The change caused by this rewriting is not simply that we do not know any
more that Paul saw Miriam gazing rather frightened. This phrase, which
exclusively represents Paul's point of view, has the effect of extending a
horizon of Paul's point of view beyond its small stretch in the original text.
Paul was watching Miriam unable to distinguish anything in the greying
light. In a similar vein, replacement by ga of the wa attached to the he after
"Where?" in the Japanese version might have caused a more serious effect
than simply removing this sentence from Paul's point of view.
The effect of wa in the original passage, then, is that Paul and Miriam
existed in each other's consciousness through the passage of time indepen
dently of their understanding of each other's actions. Thus, for example, he
in the sentence "'where?' he asked" not only functions as a term referring
to the actor of the action of asking (which is the only syntactic information
coded in English), but, with wa attached to it in the Japenese translation,
allows (or, perhaps forces) us to understand that this action of Paul's took
place under circumstances where Paul and Miriam were attentive to them
selves and to each other. The sentence represents a "double" judgment in
the mind of each of them.
5. Our third and last example is from William Faulkner, The Sound and
the Fury, the first section, April seventh, 1928. This section is a first-person
narration by Benjy, an imbecile, of his experience in the afternoon and in
the evening until he went to bed on April seventh, 1928, his 33rd birthday.
Benjy does not speak and he does not understand language; he is totally
incapacitated mentally. It is Faulkner's ingenious stylistic adventure to have
an imbecile without language competence narrate his own experience (with
flashbacks — according to someone's count there are 127 flashbacks in this
section). Benjy's consciousness simply responds passively to outward
stimuli and stimuli evoked by his memory. It is an ironical contradiction
that an imbecile lacking totally the faculty of reflective consciousness nar
rates his experience (in the past tense).
"It's too cold out there." {Versh} said. "You don't want to go out
doors."
"What is it now." {Mother} said.
"He want to go out doors." {Versh} said.
"Let him go." Uncle {Maury} said.
"It's too cold." {Mother} said. "He'd better stay in. Benjamin. Stop
that, now."
SO-CALLED TOPIC WA IN TOLSTOI, LAWRENCE AND FAULKNER 159
NOTES
*Final preparation of this paper was done while the author was a fellow at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the
Center, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the System Development Foundation. I am also
grateful to Susan Fischer and Leslie Saxon for improvements in the text.
1) "The categorical and the thetic judgment. Evidence from Japenese syntax," Foundations
of Language 9.2, 1972; "Subject" in M. Shibatani ed. Japanese Generative Grammar: Syntax and
Semantics Vol. 5, Academic Press, New York, 1976; both papers are also reprinted in S.-Y.
Kuroda, The (w)hole of the Doughnut:Syntax and its Boundaries, E. Story Scientia, Ghent-
Antwerp, 1979. For the original work of Anton Marty on this matter, see Anton Marty, Unter
suchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, Max
Niemeyer, Halle, 1908; Psyche und Sprachstruktur, Francke, Berne, 1925.
2) "Where epistemology, style and grammar meet," in S.R. Anderson and P. Kiparsky eds.,
A Festschrift for Morris Halle, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Sydney, 1973, pp. 377-391; "On
grammar and narration," in Actes du Colloque Franco-Allemand de Grammaire Transfor
mationelle, II. Etudes de Semantique et autres, Niemeyer, 1974, pp. 165-173; "Reflections on the
foundations of narrative theory," in T. van Dijk ed. Pragmatics of Language and Literature
North Holland Publ. Co., Amsterdam. The first and third papers are also reprinted in Kuroda
op. cit.
REFERENCES
1. Introduction
It has long been observed that the particle wa figures prominently in
negative sentences. Negative sentences generally contain more was than
their corresponding affirmative sentences, as is exemplified in (1) and (2).
(1) a. tooji no hooritsu de wa onna mo kubunden ga
that-time LK law by women also land
mora-e-ta.
receive-can-PST
By the law of that time, women could also receive an allot
ment of land,
b. tooji no hooritsu de wa onna wa kubunden wa
that-time LK law by women land
mora-e-na-katta.
receive-can-NEG-PST
By the law of that time, women could not receive an allot
ment of land.
(2) Q: kesa koohii o nomimashi-ta ka?
this-morning coffee DO drink-PST QU
Did you drink coffee this morning?
A: a) ee, (kesa koohii ) nomimashi-ta.
yes drink-PST
Yes, I did.
b) iie, kesa wa koohii wa nomimas-en-deshita.
no this-morning coffee drink-NEG-PST
No, I did not drink coffee this morning.
The purpose of this paper, then, is to examine the role of wa in nega-
166 NAOMI HANAOKA McGLOIN
tive sentences. I will try to do this by first contrasting wa and other particles
in negative sentences, and secondly, by investigating how the occurrence of
wa affects the interpretation of negative sentences in Japanese.
By using ga, the writer builds up his case to say that Ishida's death was
indeed not accidental, contrary to what was commonly believed to be the
case. If wa were to be used in the above sentences, the facts would be pre
sented matter-of-factly, and there would be no building of suspense.
In the following example, the use of ga vs. wa reflects a subtle differ
ence in the participants 1 view of the same fact.
(21) aru hi zettaini junban ga ki-temo "shi-na-i"
one day never turn SB come-though do-NEG
to iiharu ko ga i-ta. sore wa "hanashi wa
QT say-insist child SB be-PST that talk TP
nannimo і!" to yuu otoko-no-ko datta.
nothing be:NEG QT say boy COP:PST
... koochoo-sensei wa sono ko no kara ni
principal TP that child GN empty RS
nat-ta obentoo-bako no not-ta tsukue no
become-PST lunch-box SB place-PST desk LK front
ni iku to it-ta.
LC go when say-PST
"kimi wa hanashi ga -i no kaa ...."
you TP talk be:NEG NOM QU
"(hanashi wa)2 nannimo nai."
talk nothing be:NEG
One day, a boy would not talk when his turn came. The boy
insisted that he had nothing to say. The principal walked over to
his desk where an empty lunch box was placed and said, "You
don't have anything to say?" "Nothing to say," the boy
answered.
(Kurovanagi, Madogiwa no Tottochan: 144)
Here, the boy uses wa as in "hanashi wa nanimo nai" while the princi
pal is using ga as in "hanashi ga nai no kď" Hanashi 'talk' has been estab
lished in this discourse in that everyone was expected to have something to
talk about. Wa is a flat denial of this proposition. The boy is merely stating
a fact. By using ga, however, the teacher again expresses his evaluation —
i.e., he thinks it very strange for anybody not to have anything to talk
about; everybody should have something to talk about.
The above examples illustrate, then, that the use of non-wa-marked
negation is highly evaluative and reflects the speaker/writer's subjective
172 NAOMI HANAOKA McGLOIN
tion. Sentences (33), (34), (35) and (36) involve e (direction), to (commita-
tive), de (locative) and de (means), respectively. Sentences (33)-(36) predo
minantly give a reading where NP-wa is inside the scope of negation,
although the other reading is not entirely impossible. Sentence (36), for
example, is most naturally interpreted as denying the use of chopsticks and
not the eating of steaks. In (37) and (38), which are at the bottom of the
thematic hierarchy, NP-wa is solely interpreted as being inside the scope of
negation. Sentence (38) contains an object of comparative particle. It does
not deny that the younger sister does well but denies that it is to extent of
her older sister.
This is not to say that wa in cases such as (29) and (30) never becomes
the target of negation. However, since they are high in the thematic hierar
chy, it takes more extra devices for contrastive interpretation to obtain here
— e.g., stress on wa or a context which would force a contrastive interpre
tation.
5. Summary
Givón (1978:109) states:
Negatives are consistently more marked in terms of discourse-pragmatic
presupposition, as compared to affirmatives. ...negatives are uttered in a
context where corresponding affirmatives have already been discussed, or
else where the speaker assumes the hearer's belief in — and thus familiar
ity with — the corresponding affirmative.
The general preference for wa in negative sentences is no doubt a
direct consequence of this presuppositional nature of negative sentences.
Japanese, however, syntactically distinguishes at least two types of negative
use. Non-wα-marked negation is evaluative, and is used to impose the
speaker/writer's subjective value judgment. Wa-marked negation is more
objective or non-evaluative, and is used when the corresponding affirma
tives can be reasonably assumed from the discourse.
The particle wa plays a crucial role in interpreting wa-marked negative
180 NAOMI H A N A O K A McGLOIN
sentences. The following principles hold for determining the scope of nega
tion in wa-marked negative sentences. 12
1. In general, the constituent which represents the NEW information
in a sentence is the target of negation. A constituent marked by the thema
tic wa represents given information and is outside the scope of NEG. A
constituent marked by the contrastive wa represents new information and
hence signals the target of NEG.
2. Wa which follows a predicate is always contrastive. Whether post-
nominal wa is thematic or contrastive is determined along a hierarchy simi
lar to the Keenan-Comrie accessibility hierarchy.
3. Generally, a constituent which immediately precedes contrastive wa
is the target of negation.
4. Post-nominal wa can give a VP-scope NEG reading if there is a
strong semantic/syntactic tie between an NP and the verb.
NOTES
*Many of the ideas expressed in this article are also discussed in my forthcoming monograph
entitled Negation in Japanese. This article, however, presents some revision and extension of
parts of the monograph. I am indebted to John Hinds, Shoichi Iwasaki and Senko Maynard for
valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper.
1) If wa is interpreted as thematic, sentence (6b) will have a non-implicational reading, while
a contrastive interpretation of wa gives an. implicational reading. The thematic vs. contrastive
uses of wa will be discussed in some detail in section 3.
2) The phrase hanashi wa is in parentheses because this phrase does not appear in the actual
passage. I have supplied this phrase for the sake of clarity.
3) The examples given so far involve only ga and vs. wa. The above generalization, how
ever, holds also for other particles, although actual examples are rather scarce.
(i) a. kokontoko shi go nichi uchi e kaer-anai n desu yo.
these-days four five days home to return-NEG NOM COP EX
He has not returned home for four or five days lately,
b. kokontoko shi go nichi uchi e wa kaetteimas-en.
has-returned-NEG
(ii) a. kuruma de ko-na-katta.
car by come-NEG-PST
I did not come by car.
b. kuruma de wa ko-na-katta.
I did not come by car.
Sentences (ia) and (iia) are still felt to be evaluative. By uttering (ia), the speaker presents the
act of not returning home as unusual/strange. Sentence (iia) is more likely to be uttered when
the norm is to come by car. Sentences (ib) and (iib) lack such an implication.
THE ROLE OF WA IN NEGATION 181
In (viii) and (ix), however, the implied contrast still holds between two predications of the same
topic, and not between two independent propositions.
There are, however, rare cases where wa implies a contrast between two propositions, as in
the example cited in Kuno (1973:46).
(χ) ame wa futteimasu ga, kasa wa motteikimas-en.
rain falling but umbrella bring-NEG
It is raining, but I won't take my umbrella with me.
9) [Obj of Prep] is a large category and needs to be broken down further in Japanese. Inoue
(1976:187) presents the following more detailed hierarchy for Japanese.
Subject > Dir obj > Indir obj > Loc NI > Loc >
Dir E/NI > Loc DE > "jokaku" DE > "kijunkakiŕ DE >
"dakkaku" > Possess > Origin > "zuikaku" > reason >
Obj of Comparative Prt
10) The emphatic particle wa is often contracted to ya when it follows a verbal stem, as in
"make ya shinai."
11) Native speakers' judgment on the following sentences vary greatly.
(xi) ?osake nomi wa shi-na-katta ga, koohii o takusan non-da.
liquor DO drink do-NEG-PST but coffee DO a-lot drink-PST
We did not drink liquor, but drank lots of coffee.
(xii) ?kinoo wa ginkoo e iki wa shi-na-katta. yunion e it-ta.
yesterday TP bank to go do-NEG-PSTunion to go-PST
Yesterday, I didn't go to a bank, but went to the Union.
Most people find these sentences awkward, and that would indicate that a post-verbal wa does
not extend to an NP in a sentence.
12) Kuno claims that the scope of a negative morpheme nai normally includes only the verbal
(i.e., verbs, adjectives and X dal desu) which immediately precedes nai. He also states that
other constituents can be included in the scope of nai only if it is the focus of a sentence which
has a "multiple-choice" type information structure. For more details on this, see Kuno (1980 and
1983)
REFERENCES
SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
Ohio State University
question already assume an identifiable set, say, [Taro, John, and Mary]. By
Condition 2, which requires every member of the set to be represented in
the question, it must be the case that some of the members went at 3, the
other(s) at 4. For example, Taro and John went at 3 and Mary at 4. It can
not be the case that Taro went at 3, John at 4, and Mary at some other time
because this excludes Mary from being represented by the question, and
this would violate Condition 2. If the speaker knows that the three mem
bers went at three different times, all three must be contrasted.
(12) dare wa sanji ni itte, dare wa yoji ni
who TP 3 o'clock at go:GER who TP 4 o'clock at
itte, dare wa goji ni itta no?
go:GER who TP 5 o'clock at went QU
Who went at 3 o'clock, who went at 4 o'clock, and who went at
5 o'clock?
The following is yet another illustration that Condition 2 must be
adhered to without exception. The utterance by Speaker A sets up a defi
nite set of individuals [Taro, John and Hanako].
(13) Speaker A: taroo to jon to hanako ga betsubetsu-ni
Taro and John and Hanako SB separately
itta yo. hitori wa sanji ni itte,
went EX one TP 3 o'clock at go:GER
moo hitori wa yoji ni itte,
more one TP 4 o'clock at go:GER
sannin-me wa goji ni itta soo da.
third-one TP 5 o'clock at went hear COP
Taro and John and Hanako went separately. I heard
that one went at 3, another at 4, and the third at 5.
Speaker :* taroo wa sanji ni itta kedo,
Taro TP 3 o'clok at went but
dare wa yoji ni itte,
who TP 4 o'clock at go:GER
dare wa goji itta no?
who TP 5 o'clock at went QU
Even though all three members of the shared set are represented in
190 SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
speaker B's utterance, only two of them are found in the WH question por
tion because taroo is explicitly excluded from it. This comprises a violation
of Condition 2 because not all members of the shared set are exhaustively
represented in the WH question.
because the predicate kite and hon yondeiru do not share anything in
common to contrast. However, once it is known that it is presupposed that
some members of the definite set came (say, to a party) while others chose
to be reading a book (instead of coming to the party), the sentence becomes
acceptable. The fewer items that the contrasting phrases have in common,
the more difficult it is to set up an obvious contrast, thus requiring a much
more elaborate presupposition.
(24) ???dare wa niji ni daigaku de hon
who TP 2 o'clock at university at book DO
karite, dare wa aisukuriimu ga suki ?
borrow:GER who TP ice cream DO like COP QU
Who will borrow a book at the university at 2 o'clock, and
who likes ice cream?
A WH postpositional phrase likewise is acceptable whether the phrase
to which the postposition attaches is just the WH or a longer phrase con
taining the WH.
(25) doko ni wa itte, doko ni wa ikanakatta no?
where to TP go:GER where to TP didn't-go QU
Where did (you) go, and where didn't (you) go?
(26) doko de wa hon o utteite,
where at TP book DO is-sold:GER
doko de wa zasshi o utteiru no?
where at TP magazine DO is-sold QU
Where are books sold, and where are magazines sold?
(27) dono honya de wa hon o utteite,
which bookstore at TP book DO is-sold:GER
dono honya de wa shinbun utteiru no?
which bookstore at TP newspaper DO is-sold QU
Which bookstore is selling books, and which bookstore is selling
newspaper?
(28) dono tomodachi no uchi ni wa itte,
which friend GN house to TP go:GER
dono tomodachi no uchi ni wa ikanakatta no?
which friend GN house to TP didn't-go QU
Which friend's house did (you) go to, and which friend's house
didn't (you) go to?
196 SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
2.1. Contrastive Wa
Let us begin with a simple case of non-WH contrastive wa. Suppose
that the following is uttered in a conversation in which Taro and Hanako
have been the topic, i.e. Taro and Hanako contextually comprise an identi
fiable set.
(29) taroo wa uchi e kita kedo, hanako wa konakatta.
Taro TP house to came but Hanako TP didn't-come
Taro came to (my) house, but Hanako didn't come.
By our assumption, wa set-anaphorically refers to [Taro, Hanako].
Unlike the WH case, however, the NPs to which wa attaches are referen
tial, and they exhaustively refer to the members of the set. Now, suppose
that, instead of (29), the speaker utters the following.
(30) taroo wa uchi e kita.
Taro TP house to came
WA AND THE WH PHRASE 197
are the cases in which the NP itself does not make any reference. Observe
the following example and discussion by Kuno (1973:48).
(31) watakushi ga shitteiru hito wa paatii ni kimasendeshita.
I SB know person TP party to didn't-come
(i) Speaking of the persons I know, they did not come to the
party.
(ii) (People came to the party, but) there was none whom I
know.
Watakushi ga shitteiru hito4 'people whom I know' is ambiguous; it
can mean either one or more persons whom the speaker knows, whom he
has already talked about, or some persons whom the speaker knows,
whom he probably has not talked about. If the first meaning is the correct
one, wa can be regard as thematic wa [(the first interpretation)]...On the
other other hand, if watakushi ga shitteiru hito is taken as nonanaphoric,
wa...cannot be thematic; it must be contrastive [(the second interpreta
tion)].
We will discuss thematic wa later. Our present point of interest is
Kuno's description of the "nonanaphoric" interpretation given in (ii). We
assume that the use of wa here is also set-anaphoric. But what exactly is the
set being referred to? Certainly, we cannot assume that a predetermined
identifiable set exists contextually (at least, we need not assume this for the
sentence to be appropriate). What we claim is that the set in this case is the
one created linguistically by the indefinite NP watakushi ga shitteiru hito
"persons whom I know." The set thus produced includes all of the people
that the speaker knows. The individual members of the set are indefinite
and nonspecific, but the set itself is determinable, and wa refers set-
anaphorically to this set. Our assumption associates a slightly different lit
eral interpretation from the one given by Kuno for the nonanaphoric use of
the NP in (31). The literal sense of (31) is "all of the people whom I know
did not come," as opposed to Kuno's "some people whom I know..." Our
interpretation directly reflects the truth condition of the sentence. When
used nonanaphorically, the sentence describes a state of affairs in which none
of the people whom the speaker knows came to the party. If at least one
person whom the speaker knows did come, the sentence is false.
There is a second possibility for the membership of the set set-
anaphorically referred to in (31). The sentence has a contrastive reading, as
indicated by Kuno, between "the people I know" and "the people whom I
don't know." One way to capture this contrastive interpretation is by plac-
WA AND THE WH PHRASE 199
ing both types of individuals — those that the speaker knows and those that
he/she does not know — into the set set-anaphorically referred to by wa. If
this is the case, the indefinite NP represents only a portion of the set —
those the speaker knows — so that a contrastive relation is set up between
this subset (those the speaker knows) and the rest of the set (those the
speaker does not know). But this is inconceivable. If this really were the
case, the literal sense of the sentence would be that every individual whom
the speaker does not know came to the party, literally billions of people.
The sentence certainly does not imply that. Consequently, the fact that the
sentence implies that (some) people whom the speaker does not know came
to the party is an implication inferred from the entire sentence in context. 5
We assume that an indefinite NP such as the one in (31) can be
analyzed by a logical quantifier-variable relation. 6 The two potential quan
tifiers are the universal quantification (All x, such that χ is a person I know)
and the existential quantification (There exists x, such that χ is a person I
know). The interpretation we assume is the former. We predict in fact that
wa requires universal quantification when attached to an indefinite NP
because of its set-anaphoric property. The quantifier ALL inherently forms
a complete set while the existential quantification does not. This predicts
that an indefinite NP with existential quantification is always ungrammati-
cal with wa. This is borne out in the following unacceptable sentence.
(32) *aru hito wa kita.
some person TP came
A person came.
The variable bound by ALL ranges over all of the members of the set
set-anaphorically referred to by wa. This quantifier-variable structure is
similar, but not the same, as the WH wa case. In the latter, the speaker and
the hearer share the knowledge of the existence of a definite set of individu
als. The WH question must be set up in such a way that contrast is presup
posed among the members of this set. Otherwise, the question would be
asking about something already shared by the participants in the conversa
tion. In the universally-quantified indefinite NP, there is no definite set of
individuals assumed, hence contrast — either in the form of a question or a
statement — need not be set up. In fact, we predict that no contrast can be
set up with such a set beyond the "informal" inference illustrated for (31),
which does not involve contrast within the set. The only way for an indefi
nite NP to appropriately act as the set set-anaphorically referred to by wa is
200 SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
2.2. Thematic wa
It is well known that a WH phrase cannot occur with thematic wa.
Thematic wa always requires a referential NP because a theme is anaphoric
(or generic) (Kuroda 1965, 1972; Kuno 1973). We will show that this use of
wa can reduce to the general property of wa so far outlined for WH wa and
"contrastive" wa.
Consider the following thematic wa construction.
(33) taroo wa ashita kuru.
Taro TP tomorrow come
As for Taro, he will come tomorrow.
The sentence presupposes that Taro has been a topic of the conversation,
so taroo is the theme of the sentence, hence anaphoric {taroo wa does not
receive prominent intonation). By our analysis, this wa set-anaphorically
refers to a determinable set. But what is this set? Because taroo is contextu-
ally shared, we assume that the set is made up exclusively of one member,
taroo. Thus, wa refers to the set [Taro]. The word taroo is referential, and
it refers exhaustively to the set. Both conditions are thus met. Because the
entire set is referentially represented, there is no need to set up an IS IN
CONTRAST TO relation in order to represent those members not referen
tially picked out.
In our system, then, the difference between thematic wa and contras
tive wa boils down to how the requirement is met that the members of the
set must be exhaustively represented. If only a portion of the set is referen
tially picked out, it is put in contrast to the other members, resulting in a
contrastive reading. If, on the other hand, the members of the set are
exhaustively referentially picked out, and are associated with the same
property, the result is thematic wa.
WA AND THE WH PHRASE 201
These four ways (we group (36a) and (36b) together) of using a set
with wa are mutually exclusive, so that one cannot use the same set for
more than one of the four types in one sentence. The possibility of some of
the pairings is automatically ruled out by their inherent nature. (36a/b) and
(36c) cannot be used in the same sentence because (36a/b) requires the rela
tion IN CONTRAST TO, thus associating contrasting properties to the set
members, while (36c) referentially picks out every member of the set and
associates one property to them. (36c) and (36d) cannot be paired for the
same reason: (36c) associates the same property to all of the members while
(36d) requires that the set be partitioned into contrasting parts. With these
two possible pairings out of the way, we are left with four possibilities: the
pairing of (36e) with each of the other three, and (36a/b) and (36d). (36e)
cannot be paired with any other use because it alone does not presuppose a
set of definite individuals.
(37) a. *boku ga shitteiru hito wa,
I SB know person TP
jon wa nijі ni itta ga, ...
John TP 2 o'clock at went but ((36e), (36a/b))
(Of) all the people whom I know, John went at 2, but...
b. *boku ga shitteiru hito wa,
I SB know person TP
jon wa nijì ni itta.
John TP 2 o'clock at went ((36e), (36c))
*(Of) all the people whom I know, as for John, he went at 2.
*kimi ga shitteiru hito wa, dare wa kite,
you SB know person TP who TP come:GER
dare wa kona katta no?
who TP didn't-come QU ((36e), (36d))
(Of) all the people whom you know, who came and who
didn't?
In these examples, the use of wa in the first portion of the sentence
does not assume a set of definite individuals because the NP is indefinite,
nonspecific, and non-WH, while such a set must be assumed for the wa in
the second part of the sentence. The exclusion of these three pairings leaves
only the [(36a/b), (36d)] pairing to deal with. The inappropriateness of this
pairing is shown below.
204 SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
2.4. Set-Contrast
Let us consider here the term "contrast." We have been using this term
to refer to the type of relation shown in (36a) and (36b); this is the relation
IN CONTRAST TO that holds between a member or members referen
tially referred to and the rest of the set, or between referentially picked out
members (the sum of which exhaustively make up the set members) that
are associated with contrasting properties. Two types of "contrastiveness"
WA AND THE WH PHRASE 205
are so far excluded: (a) the type of contrast between the values of variables
χ and y in WH wa cases (cf. (36d)); (b) the type of contrast exemplified in
Kuno's sentence given in (31) in which the sentence as a whole appears to
imply that (some) people whom the speaker does not know came to the
party. We would want to exclude this latter "contrast" because it has
nothing to do with the inherent property of the set, but rather, it is simply
implied by the entire sentence in context. Indeed, we saw the absurd conse
quence of attempting to cast this contrast as one between the members of
the set: such an interpretation implies that every person (in the world)
whom the speaker does not know came to the party.
What about the other case of contrast, the one between the values of
variables bound by WH phrases? This constitutes a bonafide case of con
trast within a set because the values of the variables together must cover the
entire set as required by Condition 2. We would want to have this contrast
included in our sense of contrast. What is it about this case of contrast that
is the same as the contrast set up by the referential NPs illustrated in (36a)
and (36b)? In both, the contrast arises from partitioning the set into two or
more parts. For the referential NP, the set is partitioned into the subset(s)
referentially referred to that are associated with contrasting properties. For
WH wa, the set is partitioned into as many subsets as there are WH
phrases. Let us refer to both of these "intra-set" contrasts as "set-contrast"
to distinguish it from the informally inferred contrast shown for the "party"
sentence in (31).
(40) Set-contrast
Partitioning of a set into two or more subsets, the member(s) of
one subset being associated with a property that can be con
trasted with the property explicitly or implicitly associated with
the member(s) of the other subset(s).
The fact that different properties can be associated with a portion of
the set presupposes the existence of a set of definite individuals whether or
not the actual word itself is definite. As we have seen, such a set is presup
posed in both the WH wa and referential NP wa set-contrasts.
The summary given in (36) and the subsequent discussion show that
the use of wa is either set-contrastive or non-set-contrastive. This, we
claim, is the most basic distinction to be drawn for the use of wa. Any
apparent "degrees" of contrastiveness, for example, are due to other, extra-
linguistic factors.8 The most fundamental property of wa is that it is set-
206 SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
3. On ga
Kuno (1973:51) identifies two types of ga, "descriptive" and "exhaus
tive-listing." Sentences with descriptive ga "present an objectively observ
able action, existence, or temporary state as a new event," while exhaus
tive-listing ga exhaustively lists individuals associated with one property.
According to Kuno, "only the subject of action verbs, existential verbs, and
adjectives/nominal adjectives that represent changing stages can be fol
lowed by the descriptive ga, while there are no such restrictions in the case
of exhaustive-listing ga [fn.]" (pp. 49-50). The following are taken from
Kuno 1973; the sentences in (41) exemplify descriptive ga while (42)
exemplifies exhaustive-listing ga.
(41) a. jon ga asoko ni tatteiru.
John SB over-there at standing
John is standing over there.
b. tsukue no ue ni hon ga aru.
desk LK top at book SB exist
There is a book on the top of the desk.
c. sora ga akai.
sky SB red
The sky is red.
(42) jon ga gakusei desu.
John SB student COP
John is a student.
As we did for "thematic" and "contrastive" wa, we will attempt to
unify these two uses of ga by identifying a fundamental property of ga for
all uses, and deriving any differences from the interaction of this property
with other sentential and contextual factors.
gďs fundamental function is to create a set. The members of this set are
exhaustively associated with the property represented in the predicate por
tion of the sentence. For example, in (43) below, the set [Taro, Hanako] is
created by ga, and the property "came" is exhaustively associated with the
members of this set.
(43) taroo to hanako ga kita.
Taro and Hanako came.
A reasonable way to look at (43) is that the property "came" exhaus
tively describes the members of the set [Taro, Hanako] created by ga. The
following also illustrates this.
(44) a. dare ga kita no?
who came?
b. jon ga kita no?
Did John come?
In (44a), the question can be rephrased as "to whom can the property
'came' be associated?"; and (44b) can be rephrased as "is it the case that
the property 'came' is associated with John?" Note that by our analysis,
every instance of ga involves a complete set. This precludes establishment
of set-contrast. The following pair of sentences, one with WH ga and the
other with WH wa, illustrates this.
(45) a. dare ga niji ni itte, dare ga sanji ni
who SB 2 o'clock at go:GER who SB 3 o'clock at
itta no?
went QU
Who went at 2, and who went at 3?
b. dare wa niji ni itte,
who TP 2 o'clock at go:GER
dare wa sanji ni itta no?
who TP 3 o'clock at went QU
Who went at 2, and who went at 3?
The WH wa example in (45b) assumes a shared set of definite individu
als, and the variables bound by the WH phrases together exhaustively
range over the set members, thus setting up set-contrast. For (45a), it is
presupposed that someone went at 2 and someone at 3, but these together
need not exhaustively represent a shared set (if such a set is indeed
assumed). Unlike (45b), it is possible that there can be other individual(s)
WA AND THE WH PHRASE 209
who went at another time. Hence, each instance of ga creates a set, so that
in (45a), there are two separate sets at work.
3.3. On wa and ga
As our final discussion of ga, we will compare it with wa to give further
evidence that the fundamental function of ga is to create a set. Recall from
our discussion of WH wa that a sentence such as the following is anomal
ous.
(50) *jon wa hanako ga suki da kedo,
John TP Hanako DO like COP but
WA AND THE WH PHRASE 211
no?
COP QU
What does John like, and what does Taro hate?
A sentence with a noninitial wa phrase tends to be awkward. However,
(53) and (51b) are completely unacceptable because the variables, χ and y,
bound by the two WH phrases cannot together range over the original
shared set.
Note, finally, that the following is awkward.
(54) ??dare wa nani wa suki de,
who TP what TP like COP:GER
dare wa nani wa kirai na no?
who TP what TP dislike COP QU
Who likes what, and who hates what?
The difficulty with this sentence arises not from breaking up an origi
nally shared set (there are in fact two such sets), but from the complexity
involved in interpreting the sentence. Let us assume two shared sets, [Taro,
Hanako] and [pizza, sushi]. The logical form with the set-anaphoricity of
wa incorporated is (55).
(55) Which χ, χ member of [Taro, Hanako], χ likes j ,
j member of [pizza, sushi]; and
which y, y member of [Taro, Hanako], y hates ,
member of [pizza, sushi].
It is possible to set up a context in which the two sets become shared,
though admittedly it is a forced context.
(56) kinoo taroo to hanako ga kita node,
yesterday Taro and Hanako SB came because
piza to sushi dashita.
pizza and DO served
hitori wa, dashita ryoori no hitotsu ga suki da to
one TP served food LK one DO like COP QT
itta kedo,
said but
moo hitori wa, dashita moo hitotsu no ryoori ga
more one TP served more one LK food DO
kirai da to itta.
dislike COP QT said
214 SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
ject" in the sense used for wa, but rather, a ga-sentence is a "subjectless
description" of an event or an action ("thetic" judgment). Our analysis of
ga as set-creating accords well with this proposal. Because a set is not (or
need not be) presupposed, ga makes it possible to associate a property (an
event or action) exhaustively to some individual(s) by forming a set that
includes the individual(s); the property is associated with the set as a whole.
The fact that ga does not require a predetermined set, but rather creates a
set of its own accord, parallels Kuroda's observation that a ga-sentence is
"subjectless," in the sense that a ga-sentence does not predicate of a pre
determined set ("subject").
NOTES
*I am grateful to John Hinds, Shoichi Iwasaki, Akio Kamio, and Chisato Kitagawa for useful
discussions regarding the content of this paper. I am also grateful to Fumiko Harada for first
pointing out to me that wa can occur with WH phrases. The research for this paper was partially
supported by a Grant-In-Aid from the College of Humanities at Ohio State University.
1) Henceforth, we will abbreviate "WH word/phrase" as simply "WH."
2) The "definite set" need not necessarily be explicitly introduced into the conversation. It
is also possible that, by uttering a contrastive sentence, it inherently implies an identifiable set
(these are the cases where the contrastive wa phrase needs to be "anaphoric" as noted by Kuno
(1973)). We will see cases of implied identifiable sets for contrastive wa involving indefinite
phrases in Section 2.
3) The particle wa does attach to predicate phrases also. We will not deal with these cases.
See Kuroda 1965 among others for discussion of constructions where wa attaches to predicate
phrases. Also, we will not deal with any aspects of the syntax of wa. For this, see Kuno 1973,
Muraki 1974, Kitagawa 1982, and Saito (to appear) among others.
4) The romanization system used by Kuno is different from the Hepburn system used in this
paper. We will convert all examples taken from other authors into the Hepburn system to be
consistent.
5) Part of this inference depends on the "scope" interpretation of negation. For an interesting
discussion of this, see McGloin (this volume) and also Yoshida 1984.
6) For a study of quantification within a grammatical theory, see May 1977.
7) Shoichi Iwasaki (personal communication) has pointed out the following as a possible
counter-example to the claim above that an indefinite NP with wa always has the universal quan
tification.
(i) watashi ga shitteiru hito wa sannin dake kita.
I SB know person TP three only came
Only three people that I know came.
216 SHIGERU MIYAGAWA
The possible problem here is that while the wa phrase ranges over all of the people "that 1
know," the predicate sannin dake kita identifies three people "that I know." This is not a prob
lem if we consider that the logical form of (i) is, informally, "of all the people that I know, only
three of them came" (For all χ, χ people I know, only three χ came). The truth condition of this
logical form matches the sentence in (i).
8) See Inoue 1982 for an interesting discussion of how contextual information interacts with
sentential factors to give "degrees of contrastiveness."
9) See Inoue 1982 and Yoshida 1984 for interesting discussions of focus/emphasis for ga. We
exclude from our discussion what Kuno (1973) calls "ga for object marking." It is presumed that
this instance of ga falls into either the "descriptive" or the "exhaustive-listing" use dealt with in
this paper.
10) I am grateful to Akio Kamio for pointing out the following examples.
11) Mikami (1963) proposes a similar, "conditional" representation for wa, though his claim
is not contrasted with any claims about ga.
REFERENCES
Introduction
The complexity of the functions of the so-called theme marker wa has
occasioned much research and controversy in Japanese linguistics. This
paper examines the functions of the particle from both synchronic and dia-
chronic perspectives, and shows how a diachronic study of wa can contri
bute to our understanding of the particle's functions in its synchronic stage.
This paper consists of two parts. In part I, I will discuss the relationship
between different levels of themes in a discourse and the use of wa in pre
sent-day Japanese. Part II deals with the use of the particle in Old
Japanese. An examination of a text from Taketori Monogatari "The Wood
cutter's Tale" (tenth century) and Geriji Monogatari "The Tale of Genji"
(eleventh century) is presented here. I will then make suggestions about the
process of the development of the particle. Part I and Part II together will
clarify how wa in the synchronic stage contains its original function as well
as extended functions.
1. Background discussion
Concerning the function of wa in a sentence like (1), the particle wa
has been classified as a "topic" marker or "theme" marker (the terms
"topic" and "theme" have been used interchangeably by most linguists).
But what is the "topic/theme" that this particle indicates?
(1) jon wa gakusei desu.
student is
"John is a student."
222 NORIKO FUJII UENO
shinpaishita.
worried
"He worried because he knew the internal situation."
b. kare ga nijoo o shitteiru kara shinpaishita.
"I (or someone else) worried because he knew the internal
situation."
(6) watashi wa katsuragi-fujin no me-no-mae-de kanojo no
I Mrs. Katsuragi in front of her
otto ate no tegami o kaita koto ni hidoku
husband to letter DO wrote that very
manzokushinagara kodomo ga suteppusuru yooni
satisfied while child SB step like
yuki tokidoki keri yukkuri kubochi no toori
snow DO sometimes kick slowly potholes street DO
aruiteitta.
walked on
"I slowly walked on a rough street and like a child stepping, I
sometimes kicked up snow, satisfied with the fact that I wrote a
letter to Mrs. Katsuragi's husband in front of her." (From the
novel Banka by Yasuko Harada. In Mikami 1975:326)
In (5a) the person who worried is kare "he." However, when wa is
replaced by the subject marker ga, the sentence no longer conveys the
meaning that the person who knows the internal situation and the person
who worried are the same. Instead, it means that someone else (not kare
"he") worried since he (kare) knew the internal situation. This is because
wa sets a framework for the sentence, limiting the applicability of the pred
ication to the NP that is marked by wa. Ga, however, being a subject
marker, does not easily extend its applicability beyond the clause, and does
not have the function of setting a frame for the rest of the sentence.
Similarly, in (6), watashi wa semantically corresponds to the final pred
icate of each clause and of the sentence as a whole, and thus the sentence
reads as it appears in the translation. This is because of the function of wa
to indicate the frame within which the sentence holds. When we change the
wa to ga, the relationship of watashi ga with the final predicate becomes
very remote, and the relationship of the NP becomes limited to the verb
224 NORIKO FUJII UENO
kaita "wrote" in the embedded clause. Therefore, the sentence conveys that
maybe someone else was satisfied and walked slowly.
Was function of setting a frame in (5) and (6) is illustrated below:
2. Discourse functions of wa
2.1. Theme/frame on the level of discourse
Recently linguists have made significant progress in understanding the
discourse and pragmatic functions of wa. Going beyond the characteriza
tion on the sentence level that wa is either thematic or contrastive (Kuno
1973), studies such as those by Maynard (1980, 1984) and Hamada (1983)
have shown how the use of wa in a sentence is governed by the organization
of a paragraph/text: namely, that NPs which are chosen to be the theme of
a paragraph are marked by wa when they become the theme of a sentence
in the paragraph. 1 At the same time, it has become clear that the "given"
and "new" distinction which says that wa marks old information (and
shared information between the speaker and hearer) and ga marks new
WA FROM SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVES 225
since this paragraph describes the difference in the way the Emperor treats
the first prince and Genji.
(13) a. ichi no miko wa udaijin no nyoogo ga
first child lady SB
o-umi-ni-natta kata de
Hon-give birth-PST person and
The first prince is a child of Udaijin's daughter,
b. gaiseki no ken'i ga tsuyoku
outside relatives of power SB strong
and his outside relatives' power is strong,
shitagatte kore-koso machigainaku
therefore this (person)-EMP without fail
tooguu ni tatarem o-kata to
(= crown prince) become-HON HON-person Q
seken de mite taisetsuni
world in also important think and with much care
o-tsukae-mooshiteiru ga
HUM-is serving but
and therefore thinking, he must be the one who will become
the crown prince, people in the world treat him as an impor
tant person and are serving him with much care,
d. kono atarashii miko no kagayaku-bakari no
this new child of shining
o-utsukushisa ni wa narabu beku mo nakatta node
RES-beauty to comparable even was not since
but he is not comparable to the shining beauty of this newly
born baby,
e. mikado wa ichi no miko o omotemuki
Emperor first (HON) child DO ostensibly
hitotoori taisetsuni-nasaru keredomo
ordinarily care-HON although
and therefore, although the Emperor ostensibly cares about
the first prince,
f. kono wakamiya wa kakubetsu go-hizoo-ni-nasatte
this young prince specially HON-adore-and
he adores the second prince,
WA FROM SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVES 229
oumininatta.
HON-gave birth
This lady gave a birth to a baby boy who is too beautiful to
be considered to be a creature of this world.
mikado wa donna osu ka to
the Emperor who the situation is QT
higara no tatsu no o machikanete
days SB pass NOM DO cannot wait
The emperor could not wait to see him, thinking of them and
therefore
d. isoide meshiyosete
in a hurry have (someone) bring (the baby)
When Heijuu left, Gon swiftly jumped out from the grass
and ran to the fish basket.
d. chotto ita zura ga shitakunatta no-desu.
a little mischief want to do it is that
He felt like being mischievous.
e. gon wa, biku no naka no funa o
fish basket inside of silver carp DO
tsukamidashite wa, kawa no megakete
grab river inside DO aim
ponpon nagekomimashita.
one after another threw in
Gon grabbed the silver carp in the basket and threw them in
one after another.
f. ichiban shimaini, imagi o tsukami-ni-kakarimashiîa
finally eel DO grab began
Lastly, he started grabbing the eel.
g. imagi wa, ... gon no kubi ni makitsukimashita.
eel neck wound round
The eel wound round Gon's neck.
h. sonotoki, heijuu ga, muko kara, uwaa, nusutîo
then over there from gosh thief
gitsune me!" to donarimashita.
fox shouted
Then, Heijuu shouted, Hey! You thief!
i. gon wa, bikkurishite tobiagarimashita.
with surprise jumped up.
Gon jumped up with surprise.
Heijuu, who was the thematic NP in (18a) and (18b), is no longer
marked by wa in (18Һ). Instead, the new paragraph, which starts at (18c),
has Gon as the thematic character. The story is now told with Gon as the
theme, and Heijuu's behavior in (18Һ) serves as background information
which feeds into the description of Gon's behavior in (18i).
Hamada (1983) also notes that a NP of the thematic referent may be
marked with ga later on in the discourse. He points out that this phenome
non involves changes such as a change of theme, a description from another
236 NORIKO FUJII UENO
ga conveys the progression of the event and the shift of focus more vividly.
The same kind of ga usage has also been observed in other stories I have
examined. Since ga does not present an element as a frame and has more
temporal relevance, as we saw in examples (5) and (6), it is suited to
describe speedy actions, sudden or unexpected actions or the rapid alterna
tion of actions by different participants. This pragmatic effect of ga is in
accordance with Hamada's.finding that all predicates used with non-initial
NP ga are nonstative predicates (1983:56).
keep a framework for a paragraph or text, and other was try to shift atten
tion from the on-going theme to something else. When wďs function is the
former, it is likely that the NP will be interpreted as defocused. In this con
text, what is presented with wa is well understood old information which is
in the discourse registry, and what follows the wa-marked entity is new
information to which the reader/hearer naturally pays more attention. On
the other hand, when the particle marks elements which are not activated in
the reader's/hearer's consciousness for the sake of contrast or differentia
tion, or when wa is attached to an element for the sake of assertion to draw
the reader/hearer's attention, the reader/hearer is likely to feel that the ele
ment marked by wa is emphasized. This seems to be natural when we con
sider that in the latter case, the element is presented with a special contras
tive intonation in speech.
j. gan wo tatsu
make a petition to God
made a petition to God.
In (35c) sono ni naho ihikeru "people who still keep proposing" is
marked by ha because of the contrast with orokanaru hito "silly people" in
(35b). After (35c) the story concentrates on the behavior of those men who
were persistent. Notice that in (35e) and (35g) the maintenance of the
thematic NP kono hitobito "these people" does not take ha. Example (35)
again illustrates the lack of a theme-maintaining function of ha.
Ha in this example conveys contrast and/or differentiation. Besides
contrast between "silly men" and "men who were persistent," we see the
use of ha after yaunaki ariki "unrewarding walking" in (35b). Ha here dif
ferentiates from and contrasts with "walking which brings reward." Ha
after aru toki "one time" in (35e) differentiates from other times, as well as
indicates a time framework for the predication.
ha arazariki.
was not
The mother (= Kiritsubo) is not of the status a person who
should stay near the Emperor all the time and serve him.
b. obohe ito yamugotonaku ...
reputation very good
Her reputation is very good ...
(38) a. sono toshi no natsu miyasudokoro hakanaki
that year of summer vague
kokochi ni wazurahite
conditions suffer and
and thinks of leaving Court,
That summer, the boy's mother feels vaguely unwell,
b. makadenamu to shitamafu wo
leave-VOL Q do-HON however
and thinks of leaving Court,
c. itoma sarani yurusasetamahazu
leave atall allow-HON-HON-NEG.
but (the Emperor) does not allow it at all.
In (36) Kiritsubo is introduced for the first time, and the introduction
is done with NP ( 0 noun NP11) ga, i.e. ito yamugotonaki kiha ni ha aranu
ga "a person of not the first rank." after the introduction, the story pro
ceeds, telling how the Emperor's infatuation with Kiritsubo disturbed the
others, and how their jealousy and criticism hurt Kiritsubo. Then the
author tells of the birth of a beautiful baby boy which symbolizes the deep
relationship between the Emperor and Kiritsubo. In (37) the theme has
changed to Kiritsubo's status and the Emperor's treatment of her. Notice
that despite the fact that Kiritsubo has been established as a familiar
character and is a thematic NP in the paragraph in which (37) is contained,
the reintroduction of her in (37) is not accompanied by ha. About forty
clauses later, Kiritsubo is reintroduced explicitly. The new paragraph (38)
describes Kiritsubo's falling ill and the Emperor's reaction to it. Here again
Kiritsubo's reintroduction is done with NP 0 . This is in contrast to the fact
that the reintroduction of Kiritsubo in the corresponding part in twentieth-
century versions (Yosano 1936; Tanizaki 1951; Enchi 1972; and Imaizumi
1978) is accompanied by the particle wa or mo (mo indicates an additional
252 NORIKO FUJII UENO
b. wa ga mi ha kayowaku
I GN body fragile
and self (= she herself) is fragile.
In (40) also, ha shifts attention from people who speak ill of her (= Kirit-
subo) to Kiritsubo herself, and contrasts these two people.
As the examples above have indicated, ha in Old Japanese is a local
phrase marker. Quantitative analysis also supports this observation. I have
examined the use of ha in Geriji monogatari and of wa in several rewritings
of the story in a quantitative study with respect to the following points: 1)
frequency of occurrence, 2) topic continuity, 3) the use of the particles in
marking newly introduced characters, and 4) functions of theme-creation
and theme-maintenance. The versions compared here are Genji
monogatari, eleventh century (Genji 1); a rewriting of it by Hanshichi Taga
(1723) (Genji 2); Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji by Ryuutei Tanehiko (1830)12
(Genji 3); a rewriting by Akiko Yosano (1914) (Genji 4), another rewriting
by Akiko Yosano (1936) (Genji 5); a rewriting by Junichiroo Tanizaki
(1951) (Genji 6); a rewriting by Fumiko Enchi (1972) (Genji 7); and that by
Tadayoshi Imaizumi (1978) (Genji 8). The statistics summarize an examina
tion of the first four hundred clauses of the Kiritsubo chapter of each Genji
(this amounts to somewhere between 11 and 36 pages depending on the size
of the characters of a text).
First, the frequency counting factor shows that ha is less frequently
used than wa in the twentieth-century Genjis. Table 1 shows the occurrence
of ha and wa as observed in the Genji texts. Although we notice variation
among the versions, ha's occurrence in Genji 1 is considerably lower than
that of wa in the other versions. This relates to the lack of hďs theme-main
taining function.
Genji 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Number of 65 109 95 149 168 96 128 151
Occurrences
the discourse and its current occurrence in a clause. The gap is expressed by
the number of clauses between the two occurrences. The minimum value
that can be assigned is one clause. Although Givón sets the maximum value
at twenty, I set it at thirty because in Genji 1 very distant NPs can be refer
red to with 0 anaphora. Persistence measures how continuously an NP is
referred to in subsequent clauses. Therefore, a highly topical NP in the dis
course has a low value for referential distance and a high value for persis
tence, and a non-topical NP is characterized by the opposite relation.
Table 2 shows that subject NP ha in Genji 1 has a larger number in
terms of distance and a smaller number in terms of persistence than subject
NP was in other Genjis. This suggests that NPs that are marked by ha in
Genji 1 are in general not as continuous as NPs that are marked by wa in
other versions. This means that NPs which are marked by ha have a more
peripheral role in the discourse as a whole, having temporal importance,
than NPs that are marked by wa. It is interesting to see the big gap between
(D = distance, P = persistence)
was not necessary. At the same time, the particle increased its domain from
sentence level to discourse level, and came to function as a device to estab
lish cohesion in a dicourse. Wa in present-day Japanese has the original
function as well as the extended function. This is illustrated in the follow
ing:
Conclusion
This paper shows how a diachronic investigation gives deeper insight
into the understanding of a linguistic element in its synchronic stage. The
functions of wa in present-day Japanese are quite complicated, as wa oper
ates on different levels in a discourse and has more than one function. The
complexity becomes more apparent when we consider the long history of
the development of the particle. This paper opens up an interesting ques
tion concerning the relationship between contrastive markers or markers of
emphasis and topic/theme markers in languages.
NOTES
1) "Theme" here, of course, does not mean something which is marked by wa. I am using
the term more generally in the sense of what Jones calls "central idea" (1977) and what we are
talking about.
2) It is surprising that so many studies have used this distinction as the basic pragmatic dis
tinction between these two particles, despite the fact that it soon becomes apparent that it is not
the case when examining a discourse (e.g. Chafe 1976; Inoue 1983; Haig 1983).
258 NORIKO FUJII U E N O
3) Although both Grimes (1975) and Maynard (1980) use a staging metaphor, they do not
mean the same thing by "staging." Compare the following explanations by Grimes (1) and by
Maynard (2) for the word staging.
(1) Clearly the marking of thematization is related to a semantic factor of promi
nence. It is as though stage directions were given to the spotlight handler in a the
ater to single out a particular individual or an actor, or as though one actor was
placed close to the audience and another off to the side. In fact, staging
metaphors apear to be highly appropriate for the marked varieties of a whole
range of linguistic phenomena that have a long history of being hard to handle
(1975:327).
(2) ... "staging" is used differently from Grimes. "Staging" here does not necessarily
mean "singling out" as Grimes states, but it means the phenomenon of who con
stantly remains on the stage as an important character (1980:106).
Referring to one of her examples, Maynard states that the character who is marked by wa con-
tantly remains on the stage although the spotlight may at times be weaker and at other times
stronger. In contrast, the characters who are not marked by wa appear on the stage only at those
moments when their actions become relevant to the response of the character who is marked by
wa (1980:106).
4) Gon gitsune is from an elementary textbook of Japanese, Shoogaku kokugo 4 (fourth
year) (1965).
5) Givón's topic continuity counting contains the following three discourse measurements:
1) referential distance, 2) potential interference (ambiguity), and 3) persistence. It assesses the
importance of characters in terms of how continuous they are in a discourse.
6) Although (25) shows frameworks/themes only on levels which can be formally recog
nized, there are also themes in units which may not be formally recognized, such as episodes.
Episode boundaries interact with paragraph boundaries in a complex way. Because of this com
plexity, I did not include them on a level of episode in the schematicization although I am aware
of the importance of it.
7) In determining who are the thematic characters of the text and the rank of the characters
in Gon gitsune, my ten informants showed agreement. In determining thematic characters of
each paragraph, another native speaker independently identified thematic characters for me.
"Depending on the interpretation" reflects the difference in our interpretation.
8) For arguments relating to this in Japanese, see Martin (1975:55).
9) Concerning the pragmatic effect of ha, Nakata claims that ha emphasizes the element
which precedes it (1971:278) and Konojima states that when ha is attached to an element of a
sentence, the focus is given to what follows but not on the element to which ha is attached
(1965:293).
The same kind of arguments are also observed with respect to the Korean theme marker
(n)in (Hook 1984).
10) One of the problems in a diachronic study is that original versions are often not available.
The text of Taketori monogatari in Iwanami koten taikei is based on mutoo-bon from the six
teenth century, which is the oldest transcription available. To what extent the language was
changed/unchanged in the course of transcribing is unknown. There is the same problem con
cerning Genji monogatari. The text in Iwanami koten taikei is based on a transcription from the
fourteenth century.
WA F R O M S Y N C H R O N I C A N D D I A C H R O N I C P E R S P E C T I V E S 259
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262 NORIKO FUJII UENO
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WA FROM SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVES 263
CHARLES M. DE WOLF
Chiba University, Japan
1. Introduction
While undoubtedly the far greater part of the already large body of
research on Japanese wa offers a purely synchronic analysis of the particle's
syntactic function, the concerns of this paper are primarily historical and
descriptive. The following three sections consist of: 1) a brief discussion of wa
in typological and contrastive perspective; 2) a more specifically diachronic
description, including (a) etymology, (b) pronunciation and orthography,
and (c) syntactic function; 3) a summary of similarities and differences in
the use of wa between Old Japanese (OJ) and Modern Japanese (MJ).
From this study, I draw two tentative generalizations: 1) while it is
widely assumed that the syntactic function of wa developed from an original
interjectional usage, the evidence to support this assumption is unclear; in
fact, functional overlap characterizes the earliest appearances of the parti
cle. 2) In MJ, the major (though not sole) function of wa is that of topic-
marker. For OJ, on the other hand, the particle may be more accurately
described as a general thematic phrase marker.
3.1. Etymology
Efforts to trace the etymology of wa are limited both by the antiquity
of its usage (it appears in the earliest records of the language) and by the
lack of definitive evidence for lexically related elements in the Altaic lan
guages. Nevertheless, within the realm of reasonable possibilities, Martin's
(1975) "etymological speculations" are both interesting and useful. These
include the following:
(1) wa < (bound morpheme) -ba 'place', which in turn is derived
from free form *pa, cf. Korean pa 'thing, circumstance, way'.
(2) ba as a doublet of ma 'interval, room'.
(3) "A more interesting possibility would be to consider wa<ba as a
nounlike derivative from wi-<bi- = wor <bo(-r)- 'be'; that is, wi-a>wa
'being..' The modern Okinawan copula yan would seem to be clearly an
amalgam of the particle ya + the auxiliary a-η (equivalent to Literary
Japanese ari) as we can see from the negative form: kii yan 'it is a tree': kii
ya aran 'it is not a tree'. That ya <wa<ba might earlier have derived from
a verb of existence would be very natural." (p.88) 6
Martin does not explain how such a development would be "natural,"
but this hypothesis is undoubtedly the most interesting of the three, if only
because it suggests a broader relationship to Altaic *-bi 'be'. Murayama
and Obayashi (1973), on the other hand, suggest that wa is closely related
WA IN DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE 269
3.3. Function
Whether or not wa is etymologically related to wo, the fact remains
that they share a similar functional development. In Old Japanese, both
appear as exclamatory particles. The following examples are taken from the
Manyōshw.
270 CHARLES M. DE WOLF
ifically syntactic function. The best general definition of the role of wa from
the earliest records remains G.W. Aston's (1872): "a separative or distin
guishing particle."
In this section, I have briefly discussed possible etymologies regarding
wa and their implications, particularly in regard to wo; I have also offered
background information regarding pronunciation and orthography. My
primary concerns, however, have been: 1) whether wa represents a single
particle with extended functions or more than one particle, sharing the
same phonological form; 2) whether a developmental process of wa's syn
tactic function can be inferred from historical evidence. In the first case, I
have argued for a single particle hypothesis; in the second, I have suggested
that the evidence for an historically older, functionally more basic usage is
far from clear.
b. a wa kuni-tu-kami oFo-yama-tu-mi-no-kami no ko
I earthly deity O-yama-tsu-mi-no-kami child
nari.
COP
'I am a child of the earthly deity O-yama-tsu-mi-no-kami.'
(19) a. wa-ga ko wa sina-zu te ari-keri
my child die NEG GER be PERF
'My child is not dead (but rather) is here.' (Chapter 34)
b. oki-tu-tori /kamo doku sima nil
offing birds (= "pillow word") wild ducks land island
wa-ga wi-ne- .silimo wa wasure-zi /yo
my sleep together PERF beloved forget NEG life
koto-goto ni
everything
'As long as I live, I shall not forget my beloved, with whom I
slept on an island where wild birds came to land.' (Chapter
45)
(20) kami tu se wa se haya- si. simo tu se wa se
upper GEN current current swift lower
yowa-si
weak
'The current of the upper stream is a current too swift; the cur
rent of the lower stream is a current to weak.' (Chapter 11)
Sentences of the form NP-wa + S' [NP- (ga/no) VP] S', e.g. zoo wa
hana ga nagai 'elephants have long noses' may be treated in terms of Mar
tin's first category.14 Such constructions are found in Old Japanese as well
as in the modern language, though in the former the subject of the embed
ded clause is more likely to be directly linked to the predicate, i.e. without
intervening ga or no, as can be seen in (20)-(21), cf. (22)-(23) (Man'y ōshu):
(21) waga oFo- kimi /kі no mikoto no /taka-sirasu/
our great lord majesty splendidly rule
Futagi no miya walmomoki nasu yama wal
Futagi palace hundreds (=countless) seem mountain
ko-dakasi...
tree tall
'Futagi Palace, where our divine Sovereign rules in splendor: the
mountains are covered with stately trees...'
WA IN DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE 275
5. Conclusion
In this paper, I have attempted to provide a diachronic perspective on
wa. While my purpose has been primarily to offer analytic description, gen
eral conclusions concerning the development of wa since pre-Classical
usage can also be tentatively drawn. First, the claim that wa originates from
an interjection must be questioned, since, as I have shown, the syntactic
functions found in Modern Japanese are also in evidence from the earliest
times. Furthermore, a clear-cut distinction the two usages based on position
in the sentence is difficult to justify. Secondly, wa in Old Japanese appears
to serve more as a local phrase marker than as a topic marker. Multiple
occurences of wa in a single sentence are clearly more marked in Modern
Japanese (particularly in the written language) than in Old Japanese, while
wa topic marking has become regular if not obligatory. This suggests a
"bleaching" of was semantic content and a strengthening of its syntactic
role at the sentence level.
36. ahare nari-keru mono wo, atara o-mi wo" nado ihuni,
manofpity pitiful you etc. say
37. midukara hita-higami wo kaki sagurite, ahenaku kokoro-
herself hair goes to touch alas! grieve
38. hosokere-ba, uti-hisominu-kasi. sinoburedo namida
wears a brave face yet trying tears
39. kobore-some-nure-ba, wori-wori goto ni e-nenzi ezu,
shed all the time cannot pray
40. kuyasiki koto mo ohokameru ni, hotoke mo naka-naka
regret things so many Buddha even rather
41. kokoro-gitanasi to mi-tamahitu-besi. nigori ni simeru hodo
mind sullied see will those-sullied-by-the-
42. yori mo, nama-ukabi-nite wa, kaherite
world even more being a half-hearted nun all the more
43. asiki miti ni mo tada-yohi- beku zo oboyuru. taenu
way-to-hell drifting will EX appear karma
44. suguse asakarade, ama ni
link between husband and wife not shallow nun not
45. nasade tadune tori taramu, agate
yet becoming visiting take in the end
46. ahi-sohite, sono omohide, uramesikihusi arazaramu ya
meet accompany that memory resentful of inevitable
47. asiku mo yoku mo ahi-sohite
bad good accompanying
48. to aramu wori-mo kakaramu kizarni womo
no matter what else happens occasions
49. misugu sitaramu koso, tigiri-hukaku
overlook with-determination-to vow deep
50. ahare-narame, ware mo hito mo usiro-metaku kokoro
realizing self other anxieties
51. okarezi yawa.
not resolved lest
English translation by Seidensticker (1981), pp.25-2617
286 CHARLES M. DE WOLF
"No, let us not worry too much about rank and beauty. Let us be satis
fied if a woman is not too demanding and eccentric. It is best to settle on a
quiet, steady girl. If she proves to have unusual talent and discrimination —
well, count them an unexpected premium. Do not, on the other hand,
worry too much about remedying defects. If she seems steady and not given
to tantrums, then the charms will emerge of their own accord.
"There are those who display a womanly reticence to the world, as if
they had never heard of complaining. They seem utterly calm. And then
when their thoughts are too much for them they leave behind the most hor
rendous notes, the most flamboyant poems, the sort of keepsakes certain to
call up dreadful memories, and off they go into the mountains or to some
remote seashore. When I was a child I would hear the women reading
romantic stories, and I would join them in their sniffling and think it all
very sad, all very profound and moving. Now I am afraid that it suggests
certain pretenses.
"It is very stupid, really, to run off and leave a perfectly kind and sym
pathetic man. He may have been guilty of some minor dereliction, but to
run off with no understanding of his true feelings, with no purpose other
than to attract attention and hope to upset him — it is an unpleasant sort of
memory to have to live with. She gets drunk with admiration for herself and
there she is, a nun. When she enters her convent she is sure that she has
found enlightenment and has no regrets for the vulgar world.
"Her women come to see her. 'How very touching,' they say. 'How
brave of you.'
"But she no longer feels quite as pleased with herself. The man, who
has not lost his affection for her, hears of what has happened and weeps,
and certain of her old attendants pass this intelligence on to her. 'He is a
man of great feeling, you see. What a pity that it should have come to this.'
The woman can only brush aside her newly cropped hair to reveal a face on
the edge of tears. She tries to hold them back and cannot, such are her
regrets for the life she has left behind; and the Buddha is not likely to think
her one who has cleansed her heart of passion. Probably she is in more
danger of brimstone now in this fragile vocation than if she had stayed with
us in our sullied world.
"The bond between husband and wife is a strong one. Suppose the
man had hunted her out and brought her back. The memory of her acts
would still be there, and inevitably, sooner or later, it would be cause for
rancor. When there are crises, incidents, a woman should try to overlook
them, for better or worse, and make the bond into something durable."
WA IN D I A C H R O N I C P E R S P E C T I V E 287
NOTES
I wish to thank the editors of this volume, in particular John Hinds, for suggesting needed revi
sions of this paper. All errors are of course, my own.
1) Li and Thompson classify Japanese, along with Korean, as both topic and subject promi
nent. (i) illustrates the former tendency (i.e. (the one who) went to school is who?), (ii) the lat
ter:
i. Gakkoo ni itta no wa dare ka?
school to went NOM TOP who QU
'Who went to school?'
ii. Dare ga gakkoo ni itta ka?
who school to went QU
'Who went to school?'
2) The relationship between wa and ba is generally accepted by both Japanese and non-
Japanese scholars. In regard to Korean (n)un, Lee Ki-Moon (1975) assumes a common origin
with Mongol third person genitive -ni (and thus, we would presume, Altaic *-n).
3) Structural parallels aside, it is interesting to note that according to Lehmann (1974), varia
tion in the form of absolute constructions (locative for Sanskrit, genitive for Greek, ablative for
Latin) indicates that they arose independently. He adds, however, that "such independent ori
gins of parallel constructions are plausible only if we can ascribe them to typological reasons."
(pp.210-211)
4) In addition to the problem of calques (e.g. Late Latin pardonare from OHG forgeben),
there is the fact of productivity: *for- continued to be a formant in the Germanic languages into
relatively recent times.
5) For an interesting discussion of the article in Indo-European languages, see Hewson
(1972).
6) In regard to phonology, Martin says: "Traditional kana spelling indicates that wa comes
from proto-Japanese pa, and that would seem to be amply confirmed by the "nigoried" form
ba..., though we might entertain the possibility that ba could be a doublet-relic of the proto form
of wa. (Modern INITIAL w- comes from proto-Japanese b- just as modern h- comes from P?-,
but the /w/ of the particle is not "initial" since particles attach with no juncture; and -w- can
come from either -p- or -b- of the proto language, though the latter is uncommon.") (p.88)
7) "wa/we, the direct object suffixes in Tungusic are strikingly absent in Mongol and Turkic
language groups, but the fact that we find corresponding wo in Old Japanese is of profound sig
nificance." (Lee Ki-Moon (1975), p.33, translation by CMD)
8) The orthographical representation here of OJ data differs from that of MJ in the following
respects: Consonants that are palatalized or affricatized in the modern language are not marked
as such, (e.g. si, ti, tu rather than shi, chi, tsu. Modern ha, hi, hu ([øu], he, ho are represented as
Fa, Fi, Fu, Fe, Fo for Nara Period (e.g. Manyōshu) data, ha, hi, hu, he, ho for Heian Period
(e.g. Genji Monogatari) data. OJ wo (e.g. wotome> MJ otome 'maiden') is represented as wo.
Except for what might be inferred from this (largely conventional) representation of the OJ con
sonant system, I have avoided making any suggestion concerning the controversial issues of OJ
phonology, in particular the vowel system.
288 C H A R L E S M. D E W O L F
9) Sansom comments: "Some etymologists have contended that [wa] originally meant mono,
'a thing', which is also so written [i.e. as ]. But the use of was clearly an imitation of
Chinese practice." (p. 262)
10) Miller attempts to clearly distinguish between "direct object" and "time-place" usage by
citing relevant examples from the Manyoshu, but the reader who looks up the poems whose
numbers are cited may be just as easily convinced of an overlapping relationship, e.g. M. 1934.
11) The construction is, of course, ambiguous, analyzable either as a relative clause + subject
without a verb or as a main clause with a delayed subject.
12) Note the modern translation, in which the nominalization is made clear by the use of par
ticle no.
konna ni yuki ga furi-tsumotte iru no wa
so snow fall stick NOM
'that so much snow is sticking...'
13) The spelling differs, the emphatic particle being written as wa vs. ha for the thematic par
ticle, but Japanese language scholars in the Kokugo tradition widely assume that they derive
from the same source.
14) For further discussion of sentential predicates, see De Wolf (1985).
15) A stronger argument might be made for a causal relationship between the loss of atrribu-
tive/predicative distinction and the obligatory use of ga (no) as a subject marker in subordiante
clauses. Nevertheless, the basic question that needs to be asked is why case marking in general,
(e.g. wo) is a more consistent feature of the modern language.
Sansom's suggestion that wa has a more crucial syntactic role in the modern colloquial may
again be compared to the theory in Indo-European linguistics that the development of article
systems is to be traced at least in part to the simplification of case systems. See Hewson (1972).
Yet another interesting (though equally unprovable and arguably less plausible) speculation
concerning Japanese is found in Akiba-Reynolds (]981)'s argument for Japanese as a mixed lan
guage: "...the fact that Old Japanese had very few case markers found in pre-Japanese corre
sponds perfectly to the observation that pidgin-creoles have very limited noun inflections."
(p.16)
16) For further discussion, see Hinds (1982). Masayoshi Shibatani (personal communication)
provides convincing evidence of subtle but significant semantic differences between subject-ø...
and subject-wa... in colloquial speech, though my own analysis may differ somewhat from his
here, wa draws attention to the NP so marked. It is omitted when the NP is being specified as a
participant in rather than as purely the referent of the predication. watashi wa shinu wa 'I'm
going to die (kill myself)' is a comment about the fate or the action of watashi. watashi shinu wa
is a statement about an event. Consider also the following excerpt from Tetsuro Miura's
Shinobugawa:
"'Nan no suzu?' Shino wa kiita.
what bell Shino asked
'What's (that) bell?'
'ba-sori no suzu, ' watashi wa kotaeta.
horse sleigh bell I replied
'It's a horse-sleigh bell, I replied.'
WA IN D I A C H R O N I C P E R S P E C T I V E 289
REFERENCES
SEIICHI MAKINO
University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana
sono ko) are registered permanently or temporarily in the mind of both the
speaker and the listener. The speaker has used a wa-marked noun to indi
cate that there is something to talk about — something the knowledge of
which is shared with the listener. In the sense that the speaker is referring
to an object which the listener already knows, the speaker is being listener-
oriented.
The speaker may use wa where it is not warranted, as illustrated by the
following example quoted from Kuno (1984):
(3) A: watakushi, kondo haabaado no suugaku-ka ni
I anew Harvard LK math-department to
kita yamada desü.
came COP
I am Mr. Yamada. I came to the math department of Har
vard for the first time.
B: haj imemas hite. doko ni osumai desu ka.
"glad to meet you" where LC living COP QU
Glad to meet you. Where do you live?
A: berumonto desu.
Belmont COP
At Belmont.
B: okosan wa, dochira no gakkoo desu ka.
your-child TP which LK school COP QU
Which school are your children attending?
A: iya, dokushin na n desu.
no single LK NOM COP
No, I am single.
The speaker has wrongly assumed that the speaker A Yamada has a
child. B's original intention was to be listener-oriented in the sense that he
tried to find a topic of conversation with which could be involved.
It has long been noted that a wh-word such as dare 'who', doko
'where', nani 'what', itsu 'when' etc. cannot be used with wa as shown in (4)
[but see Miyagawa (this volume)].
(4) *dare wa kimasu ka.
who TP come QU
Who is coming?
COMMUNICATIVE ORIENTATION AND WA 297
shichigatsu desu.
July COP
The calmest month for the ocean is July.
Independently of wa-into-ga conversion in subordinate clauses, the
subordinate clause seems to be a communicative vehicle for speaker-
oriented information. There are at least two pieces of evidence for my
claim. First, the predicate of a subordinate clause is seldom marked as for
mal. My assumption here is that formality marking results from listener-
orientation. The informal-into-formai switching of the subordinate pre
dicate in (16) yields unacceptable sentences:
(16) a. yamada-san ga iku /???ikimasu noni
SB go (informal) / go (formal) even-if
anata wa ikanai n desu ka.
you TP don't-go NOM COP QU
Aren't you going there even if Mr. Yamada is going there?
b. hitori-de kurashikku o kiiteiru
alone classical-music DO listening (informal)
l*kiiteimasu toki ga ichiban tanoshii desu.
listening (formal) time SB most happy COP
It is the happiest time when I am listening to classical music
all by myself.
watashi wa kanojo ga kurannetto
I TP she SB clarinet DO
fuiteiru /*fuitemasu no o kikimashita.
playing (informal)/playing (formal) NOM DO listened
I listened to her playing the clarinet.
d. mada nihon e itta /*ikimashita
not yet Japan to went (informal)/went (formal)
koto ga arimasen.
NOM SB isn't
I have never been to Japan.
Secondly, most listener-oriented sentence-final particles such as yo 'I
tell you', ne 'a tag question', cannot be used in a subordinate predicate. In
short, wa cannot be used inside a highly subordinate clause, exactly as pre
dicted by our principle of Orientational Conflict.
So far I have reexamined wa and ga in Japanese in terms of the func-
304 SEIICHI MAKINO
tional notion of CO. It seems to be the case that our functional notion can
account for uses of wa and ga at least as well as the old/new informational
principle. Our notion, however, has a wider range of application than the
functional notion adopted to explain uses of wa and ga.
Let me give some areas of application which I have previously discus
sed.
1. Formality-into-informality in a discourse is conditioned by speaker-
orientation. (Makino 1983)
2. The nominalizers no and koto are speaker-oriented and listener-
oriented nominalizers, respectively, because no represents directly
perceptible phenomena. (Makino 1983:138)
3. The non-restrictive and restrictive relative clauses are speaker-
oriented and listener-oriented relative clauses, respectively.
(Makino 1983:134-136)
4. The conjunctions node 'because' and noni 'although' are speaker-
oriented conjunctions, but the corresponding kara 'because' and
keredo 'although', are listener-oriented conjunctions. (Makino
1983:130-133).
5. Phenomena of repetition are accountable in terms of speaker/lis
tener-orientation. Some of the principles discussed in Makino
(1984) are as follows:
A: Principle of Pecking Order of Repetitions
Repeat more important information first, and less important
information last. But the pecking order may be violated if the
speaker of a triggering sentence is not highly listener-oriented.
B: Ban on Repetition of Highly Speaker-Oriented Information
A highly speaker-oriented piece of information should not be
repeated by itself, unless empathy is at work.
C: Principle of Informational Importance
Repeat only communicatively important pieces of information
in a sentence within a discourse. By a communicatively impor
tant piece of information is understood a highly listener-
oriented information.
D: Principle of Extended Repetition of a Wh-question
An extended repetition of a highly listener-oriented Wh-ques
tion is possible only when the repeater wants to deny the speech
act of Wh-questioning for some emotive reason.
C O M M U N I C A T I V E O R I E N T A T I O N A N D WA 305
NOTES
The broad outline of the idea included in this paper was first presented at the meeting of the
Association for Teachers of Japanese at Washington D.C., when I served as the discussant for
the linguistic session called "Functions of -WA in Japanese Discourse" on March 25, 1984. I am
grateful to comments I received from the panelists Professors John Hinds, Senko Maynard, and
Shoichi Iwasaki and the audience. But the errors included in this paper are all mine.
1) The statements (d) and (f) are worded differently from Kuno's original statements.
2) 'Listener-oriented' is used here and elsewhere as a cover term for both 'listener-oriented'
and 'reader-oriented'.
3) 'Speaker-oriented' is used here and elsewhere as a cover term for both 'speaker-oriented'
and 'writer-oriented'.
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1982. "Japanese grammar and functional grammar." Lingua.
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. 1983. "Speaker/listener-orientation and formality marking in
Japanese." Gengo uu. 84:126-145.
. 1984. "Some principles of repetition in Japanese spoken discourse." A
paper presented at the Nitobe-Ohira memorial conference on Japanese
studies, May 23-25, 1984 at the University of British Columbia, Van
couver, Canada. (To appear in the Proceedings)
Terakura, Hiroko. 1984. "The deletion of the theme of the sentence and
discourse structure." A paper presented at the Nitobe-Ohira memorial
conference on Japanese studies, May 23-25, 1984 at the University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. (To appear in the Proceedings)
ABBREVIATIONS
ATTRI Attributive
CAU Causative
CL Classifier
COP Copula
DO Direct object
EX Exclamatory particles
GER Gerund
EMP Emphatic
GN Genitive
HON Honorific
HUM Humble
HYP Hypothetical
IMPE Imperative
IN Instrumental marker
Indirect object
LC Locative marker
LK Linker
NEG Negative
NOM Nominalizer
PASS Passive
PERF Perfect
PL Plural
PST Past/perfect tense
QT Quotative marker
QU Question marker
RS Resultative
SB Subject marker
TENT Tentative
TP Topic marker
VOL Volition