Topic and focus

要旨

Abstract Chapter 5 describes the topic and nominative markers in Japanese and Korean. As commonly treated as being both topic-prominent and subject-prominent, these languages distinguish the particles for topic and nominative markers. A topic is presented as old information in a discourse, or more precisely as relationally given information, rather than referentially given information, and thus it never appears in focus, or an element presented as new information, even if it is definite. The occurrence of focus is described in relation to the presence of a nominative-marked subject. Two types of focus, i.e., narrow and wide focus, are illustrated in connection to the type of predicates (individual-level and state-level predicates). The use of nominative subjects in Korean different from that in Japanese is also mentioned. Lastly, this chapter explains another function of the Japanese and Korean topic markers, i.e., a marker for contrast.

主題