Mismatch of topic between Japanese and Korean

Abstract

This paper presents a new analysis of Japanese and Korean topic markers, focusing on their mismatch in written narrative discourse. We argue against the common assumption that the Japanese topic marker wa and the Korean topic marker nun exhibit equivalent structural, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic properties by showing that they in fact involve different types of definiteness. In particular, we argue that the Korean topic marker encodes “episode-old” entities; it can only refer back to an entity that has been mentioned in the current episode, and an old entity is often re-introduced using the nominative marker ka across an episode boundary. On the other hand, the Japanese topic marker marks “hearer-old” entities; it often refers to an entity that is not explicitly mentioned but still inferred or assumed to be in the common ground. We present the evidence obtained from a comparison of Bible translations in Japanese and Korean and picture-elicited written narratives.