A Categorial Grammar Account of Information Packaging in Japanese

Abstract

A particular characteristic of Japanese language is that information structure is explicitly indicated by overt morphological means, i.e., marking expressions with the topic particle WA, which has attracted significant attention in the literature mainly from a pragmatic perspective. This study sheds light on the semantic effects that this particle has on the contents of sentences and proposes a categorial grammar approach to information packaging. The purpose of this study is two-fold: First, by observing minimal pairs of sentences that differ only in the use of the subject-marking particles and the presence/absence of focal accents on the particles, we identify the influences of these particles on the truth conditions of sentences, and explore proper semantic representations for subjects marked with topic and nominative particles. Then, we examine the syntactic function of this topic particle to show a type of concord with sentence-final predicates, as suggested by the term kakari-josi or concord/coherence particle used in Japanese traditional linguistics. On the basis of the results, we argue that the topic particle induces information packaging (Vallduvi 1992) as its lexical property, thereby yielding tripartite information structures following Hajicova et al. (1998), which can be automatically obtained through readings of categorial proof nets. In addition, we also focuses on sentences with sentence-internal topics, cleft-constructions and multiple topic sentences from the viewpoint of incremental processing within a categorial grammar framework.