Object Topicalization, Passive, and Information Structure in Japanese

OBJECT TOPICALIZATION, PASSIVE, AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN JAPANESE Tomoko Watanabe Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics University of Cambridge Keynes House, Trumpington Street Cambridge CB2 1QA U.K. Email: tw214@cam.ac.uk ABSTRACT Object topicalization shares two functional properties with the passive: foregrounding of the patient and de-topicalization of the agent. This fact makes one wonder why the former occurs far less frequently in written text. The present paper is an attempt to illuminate some properties of object topicalization not shared by the passive. It is argued that while object topicalization may de-topicalize the agent, informational focus is brought upon it. It is then proposed that the information structure imposed by object topicalization has consequences different from the passive on the continuing discourse. 1. INTRODUCTION Functionally, the passive is generally understood to be a syntactic construction that topicalizes the patient, de-topicalizes the agent and stativizes the event (Givon [1] cited by Forrest [2, p.149]). If one takes the view that constructions can be related by a function, as Givon [3] and Shibatani [4] do, object topicalization in a topic-prominent language like Japanese should be related to the passive because it can perform the first two functions listed above. Indeed, object topicalization appears occasionally in place of a passive in English-to- Japanese translation. However, an examination of the properties of object topicalization reveals that the resemblance is only partial. This paper presents a study of object topicalization in relation to the passive in Japanese. First, I argue that object topicalization is semantically more restricted and information-structurally marked than the passive. Then, I propose that the difference in information structure presents different effects on the continuing discourse. The rest of the paper discusses the two constructions in written register only, because it is recognized (e.g. by Biber et al.[5] and Heo [6]) that generalization across registers/genres is difficult. 2. OBJECT TOPICALIZATION AND THE PASSIVE COMPARED Compare (la) and (lb). (TOP=Topic, NOM=Nominative, PASS=Passive, PST=Past) (1)� a.� Tegami wa hisyo niyotte kakus-are-ta. letter TOP secretary by hide-PASS-PST 'The letter was hidden by the secretary.' (1) b. Tegami wa hisyo ga kakusi-ta. letter TOP secretary NOM hide-PST 'The letter, the secretary hid (it).' In both, the logical object "the letter" is topicalized, and the rest of the sentence is the rheme, or added information about the topic (Vallduvi and Vilkuna [7] among others). While object topicalization is quite marked and appears primarily in spoken register in English (Lambrecht [8]), it is not so marked in Japanese and is allowed more freely in written register. However, a small sample of Newsweek magazine and its published Japanese translation reveals that it is only occasionally that an English passive is translated into object topicalization. While this may be a reflection of the translator's conservatism in preserving the source text structures, it is not the case that for each "conservative" translation, object topicalization could have been possible. Yoshihara [9] observes similar uninterchangeability in monolingual newspaper texts. This suggests that the occasional appearance of object topicalization may be reflecting something systematic. Literature …

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