Influence of Information Structure on Word Order Change and Topic Marker WA in Japanese

Influence of Information Structure on Word Order Change and Topic Marker WA in Japanese Satoshi Imamura1 Yohei Sato2 Masatoshi Koizumi2 1 Japanese Studies, University of Oxford 41 Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JF 2 Department of Linguistics, Tohoku University 27-1 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Japan Abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of given-new ordering on word order change and topic marker WA, using a self-paced reading task. The results demonstrated that OACCSNOMV is sensitive to given-new information, but SNOMOACCV, STOPOACCV, and OTOPSNOMV are not. This fact can be explained by the Markedness Principle for Discourse Rule Violation (Kuno, 1987: 212): both SNOMOACCV and STOPOACCV are not penalized even when they violate given-new ordering because they are unmarked options, OACCSNOMV is penalized when it violates given-new ordering because it is a marked option, and OTOPSNOMV is penalized even when given-new ordering is preserved because it requires more contrastive contexts (McGloin, 1990:113). Another point is that topic marker WA is not responsive to the given-new distinction. This suggests that the usage of WA does not rely on anaphoricity in general. Note that there are two usages of WA: thematic topic needs to be previously mentioned while contrastive topic does not require anaphoricity. Taken together, we can conclude that the essence of WA is not thematic topic but contrastive topic. 1. Introduction In Japanese, a relatively free word order language, various word orders share the basic meaning of a sentence. Hence, OSV can convey the same meaning as SOV does. Moreover, Japanese is equipped with topic marker WA, which can be attached to both subject and object. Therefore, there are choices between topic marker and case marker: SNOM vs STOP and OACC vs. OTOP. As a result, when they use transitive sentences, Japanese need to select an option regarding word order and marker: SOV or OSV, and case marker or topic marker. What factor, then, determines the choice among them? One factor is givenness. Since Prague School, it has been shown that word order changes follow given-new ordering i.e. given information comes first and new information comes later. In addition, research on Japanese has demonstrated that nominative case marker GA usually marks new information and topic marker WA prefers given information. Therefore, based on a self-paced reading task, we will study the relationship among word order, topic and case marker, and given-new ordering. In section 2, we will overview previous studies about scrambling, GA/WA distinction, and topicalization. Section 3 provides our experiment and discusses the results of the sentence PACLIC 28 432 ² Department of Linguistics Tohoku University 27-1 Kawauchi, Aoba-ku, Sendai Japan ¹ Japanese Studies, University of Oxford 41 Wellington Square Oxford, OX1 2JF United Kingdom Copyright 2014 by Satoshi Imamura, Yohei Sato, and Masatoshi Koizumi 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 432–441 comprehension task. Section 4 is devoted to the conclusion. 2. Previous Studies 2.1. Scrambling Theoretically, it has been assumed in general that OACCSNOMV is derived by moving the direct object to the …

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