A review of Nakagawa(2020), Information Structure in Spoken Japanese: Particles, Word Order, and Intonation

Abstract

As a review of Nakagawa(2020), Information Structure in Spoken Japanese: Particles, Word Order, and Intonation, this article summarizes its main contents, points out its problems, and examines topics comparable to the Korean information structure. Nakagawa(2020) is mainly based on the analysis of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, and uses the frame of referential information status which is a modified version of Prince(1981)’s assumed familiarity taxonomy and the category of topic and focus defined according to ‘controversiality’. The topic particles such as toiuno-wa, wa, COP-kedo/ga, and ∅ are shown to be distributed in different scopes of given-new taxonomy, and the focus particles such as ga, o, and ∅ are claimed to be correlated with the grammatical and semantic properties of NP and the type of focus. Topic and focus are claimed to appear clause-initially and right before the predicate, respectively, and to tend to be uttered in phrasal IUs (intonational units) and clausal IUs, respectively. We point out several problems of Nakagawa(2020) that it needs full discussion of discriminating topic and focus markers, more detailed description of the relationship between IUs and informational status, and reconsidering of so-called information-structure continuity principle. For comparative study of information structure of Korean and Japanese, we propose to investigate the relationship between case particles and focus, and to compare a Japanese topic marker toiuno-wa and a Korean topic marker (i)ran.