‘Contrast’ and its Relation to wa in Japanese and nun in Korean*

Abstract

There is a general confusion in the literature as to whether phrases marked by contrastive wa in Japanese and contrastive nun in Korean should be treated as contrastive topics or contrastive foci. Adopting the definitions of topic, focus, and contrast that are independently motivated by discourse considerations, this chapter investigates the meaning of wa and nun in relation to these terms, and examines the syntactic distribution of contrastive topics and contrastive foci in the two languages. It shows that wa and nun encode a particular kind of contrast that is compatible with both topic and focus, explaining the source of the confusion, but that the wa- or nun-marked phrase exhibits a different syntactic distribution depending on whether it is interpreted as a topic or focus. The evidence comes from a set of predictions regarding the syntactic distribution of a contrastive topic and a contrastive focus with respect to each other. The predictions derive from a combination of specific mapping rules between syntax and information structure, and well-formedness conditions at the level of information structure. Contrastive wa- and nun-phrases that are interpreted as topics show the predicted distribution for contrastive topics, but those that are interpreted as foci do not.