Topic prominency in Japanese

要旨

In light of the data regarding the focusing of the particle dake ‘only’, this article shows that in Japanese, wa -marked topic phrases are placed in the CP domain, and argues that this can take place either in overt constituent structure or in LF. Other ordinary phrases – including ga -marked major subjects that are sometimes assumed to reside in the same clause-peripheral position as topics – are shown to be located within TP. It is also argued that Japanese shows no evidence for “overt” wh -movement, despite Takahashi's claim (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11: 655–678, 1993, Journal of East Asian Linguistics 3: 265–300, 1994) to the contrary. The discussion suggests that the prominent use of the CP domain is subject to typological variation, and that Japanese, unlike English, is a topic-prominent language, in which a topic is placed in the CP domain – i.e., TopP located above TP – by the LF output in order to form a topic-comment structure.

主題