Some problems of functional sentence perspective in modern Japanese

Abstract

For some ten to twenty years now, an intensive development has taken place in the study of the phenomenon usually called in English ‘functional sentence perspective’ (=FSP) or ‘topic-comment articulation’. In the beginning, the investigations in this field were closely associated with the Prague School of linguistics (particularly with the name of V. Mathesius), but nowadays many linguists in various contries address themselves to problems connected with FSP. For the investigation of this phenomenon, the structure of the Japanese language deserves special interest. That is to say, Japanese seems to have its own specific grammatical device expressing FSP, namely the particles wa and ga. In the present paper (based on the analysis of over 850 pages of modern Japanese fiction), we formulate an hypothesis on the use of the particles wa and ga as attached to the word in subject position.