Perspectives on Topicalization

The case of Japanese wa

Editors

John Hinds

Shoichi Iwasaki

Senko K. Maynard

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027228857 (Eur) | EUR 125.00

ISBN 9780915027972 (USA) | USD 188.00

Paperback – Available

ISBN 9789027228864 (Eur) | EUR 48.00

ISBN 9780915027989 (USA) | USD 72.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027278814 | EUR 125.00/48.00*
| USD 188.00/72.00*

Within the field of Japanese linguistics, few areas have generated as much controversy as the morpheme wa; traditionally described as a marker of old or contrasted information, its function as a discourse marker has also been studied. This work aims to deepen the understanding of wa through careful examination of the particle at both sentence and discourse levels in old Japanese as well as present-day Japanese. Previous studies have concentrated on syntactic analyses of wa. The contributors to this volume challenge the old approach and uncover new properties of wa. The four topics discussed are: wa in Narrative and Expository Discourse; wa and other Syntactic Phenomena; Historical Perspectives on wa and Pragmatic Perspectives on wa.

[Typological Studies in Language, 14] 1987. xi, 307 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.14

Table of Contents

Preface | p. vii

Part I: Wa in narrative and expository discourse

The use of wa as a cohesion marker in Japanese oral narratives

Patricia M. Clancy and Pamela A. Downing | p. 3

Thematization as a staging device in the Japanese narrative

Senko K. Maynard | p. 57

Thematization, assumed familiarity, staging, and syntactic binding in Japanese

John Hinds | p. 83

Identifiability, scope-setting, and the particle wa: A study of Japanese spoken expository discourse

Shoichi Iwasaki | p. 107

A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrenceand Faulkner (of course, in Japanese translation)

S.-Y. Kuroda | p. 143

Part II: Wa and other syntactic phenomena

The role of wa in negation

Naomi Hanaoka McGloin | p. 165

Wa and the WH phrase

Shigeru Miyagawa | p. 185

Part III: Historical perspectives on wa

Functions of the theme marker wa from synchronic and diachronic perspectives

Noriko Fujii Ueno | p. 221

Wa in diachronic perspective

Charles M. De Wolf | p. 265

Part IV: Pragmatic perspectives on wa

How relevant is a functional notion of communicative orientation to ga and wa?

Seiichi Makino | p. 293

Abbreveations | p. 307

“This volume will appeal to a wide range of linguists, not simply those who study Japanese. It succeeds in raising new questions about the functions of wa, and will stimulate new research.”

The Journal of Asian Studies, Noriko Nagai, Duke University

Cited by

Cited by 10 other publications

Order by:

Bateman, John A.

1991. Uncovering textual meanings: a case study involving systemic-functional resources for the generation of Japanese texts. In Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics [The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, 119], ► pp. 125 ff.

Kilicaslan, Yilmaz

2004. Syntax of information structure in Turkish. Linguistics 42:4

Klingler, Dominique

2003. Spécificité du dispositif créé par le marqueur wa en japonais comparaison avec le français. Travaux de linguistique 47:2 ► pp. 163 ff.

Nakamura, Hiroaki

2008. Left-Peripheral and Sentence-Internal Topics in Japanese. In New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4914], ► pp. 160 ff.

NISHIDA, KOICHI

2007. Pragmaticalization and the History of Japanese Discourse Markers (N. Onodera, Japanese Discourse Markers: Synchronic and Diachronic Discourse Analysis). ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 24:1 ► pp. 184 ff.

Ono, Tsuyoshi & Sandra A. Thompson

2020. Chapter 12. What can Japanese conversation tell us about ‘NP’?. In The ‘Noun Phrase’ across Languages [Typological Studies in Language, 128], ► pp. 316 ff.

Teng, Minchun

2012. Using a hybrid methodology in the analysis of the topic and non-topic markers wa and ga in Chinese-to-Japanese translation. Across Languages and Cultures 13:2 ► pp. 247 ff.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher

2001. Regularity in Semantic Change,

Yamaguchi, Toshiko

2022. Reanalysis of contrastive -wa in Japanese. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 423 ff.

[no author supplied]

2016. A Cognitive Grammar of Japanese Clause Structure [Human Cognitive Processing, 53],

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Subjects

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Japanese linguistics

Main BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General

ONIX Metadata

ONIX 2.1

ONIX 3.0

U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 87029982 | Marc record