In the long history of the Japanese topic/subject research, Matsushita (1928) and Sakuma (1941) stand out as key research results. These two studies are to be mentioned specifically in that they laid the foundations of the Japanese topic/subject research, occupying important positions in the accumulated research literature dealing with the topic/subject issue. Thus I will point out the contributions that Matsushita (1928) and Sakuma (1941) made to the development of the research topic.
Let us start with Matsushita (1928). Key points presented by Matsushita (1928) are the following: (i) the distinction between the topic (Matsushita uses the term daimokugo (‘topic word’)) and the subject, (ii) a language typology in relation to the topic/subject distinction, (iii) the distinction between“the topic sentence” (a sentence with a topic) and“the topicless sentence”(a sentence without a topic), and (iv) the distinction between“known”and“unknown”. These points will be described below in this order.
With respect to thefirst point, Matsushita claims that in Japanese it is important to distinguish between“logical subject” and “grammatical subject”. According to Matsushita,“logical subject”is the entity being judged and should be calleddaimo- kugo, whereas “grammatical subject” expresses the central or subject entity of a given state of affairs. He calls attention to the fact that the topic of a sentence is not necessarily a grammatical subject (the central entity), as shown in (1) and (2).
Sakura wain (1) is both topic and grammatical subject of the sentence, while in (2) the topickono ki waexpresses the object entity of the sentence, not the subject entity.
(1) Sakura wa haru saku.
cherry blossoms TOP spring bloom
‘Cherry blossoms bloom in spring.’ (2) Kono ki wa watasi ga ueta.
this tree TOP I NOM planted
‘This tree, I planted it.’
In this connection, it is noted that Matsushita recognizes a government-dependence relation between the predicate of a sentence and its grammatical subject. This idea is equivalent to the current linguistic view that there is a dependency relation between the predicate and its subject and that the predicate is the head of a sentence. He states that the subject of a sentence as well as the object (kyakugo‘object word’in his terminology) functions to“complete the predication”. His idea that the subject functions as a complement of the predicate antedates the generally accepted view in modern linguistics that the subject is an argument of the predicate.
The second point of Matsushita (1928) is that of a language typology in relation to the topic/subject distinction. Matsushita argues that in contrast to Japanese, which requires a strict distinction between the notion of topic and that of subject, Indo-European languages like English do not distinguish these notions, expressing both the entity being judged and the central entity of a state of affairs in the form of grammatical subject. In Indo-European languages, he says, the content of (2) is expressed by sentences like“this tree was planted by me”. Thus Matsushita clearly noticed the typological difference between Japanese and Indo-European languages in respect to the distinction between the topic and the subject.
On the basis of the topic/subject distinction in Japanese, Matsushita moves a step further and points out that a Japanese sentence may or may not have a topic.
This is the third point, mentioned above, i.e. the distinction between “the topic sentence”and“the topicless sentence”.
He illustrates the topic/topicless sentence distinction with a sentence in which the particlewa is used as in (3) and a sentence in which the particle gais used as in (4).
(3) Sakura no hana wa sigatu no hazime ni saki-masu.
cherry GEN blossoms TOP April GEN beginning in bloom-POL
‘Cherry blossoms bloom in the beginning of April.’
(4) Hana ga sai-ta.
blossoms NOM bloom-PST
‘Blossoms bloomed.’
According to Matsushita, sentences like (3) take a topic-comment pattern, with the topic being presented by the particlewa, while those like (4) take a topicless pattern, where the particlegarepresents the subject relation to the predicate.
Another important observation of Matsushita’s is that the wa/gadistinction is related to the contrast ofkyū-gainen (‘old notion’) and shin-gainen (‘new notion’), an equivalent of the old/new information contrast. This is essentially the distinction between“known” and“unknown”, mentioned above. He argues that in the topic- comment composition, the topic is “determined” previous to the comment, and hence it becomes an old/known notion. The entity being judged is claimed to be
“determined and invariable” prior to the judgment. As opposed to the topic, the comment is“undetermined and variable”, and hence it becomes a new/unknown notion.
Matsushita illustrates this point with the following examples.
(5) Watasi wa nanigasi toiu mono desu.
I TOP so-and-so called person COP
‘I am a person called so-and-so.’
(6) Watasi ga o-yobidasi no nanigasi desu.
I NOM POL-paged GEN so-and-so COP
‘I am the paged so-and-so. (The person paged is me.)’
In (5), the topicwatasiis determined and invariable, and the commentnanigasi toiu mono desuis undetermined and variable, i.e. unknown. In (6), on the other hand, the determined and invariable part iso-yobidasi no nanigasi desu, with watasi ga providing an unknown notion. Matsushita further states that (6) can be converted into the topic sentenceo-yobidasi no nanigasi wa watasi desu‘the paged so-and-so is me’.
Matsushita’s observation above is noteworthy in view of the history of linguistics.
That observation was as early as that of the Prague School linguist Mathesius, who is known to be an advocate of the theory of old/new information. Another aspect of Matsushita’s observation with respect to the known/unknown distinction will be discussed in 3.2.
Let us turn to Sakuma (1941). What is significant about Sakuma’s research is his original distinction of two sentence types and its relevance to the topic/subject issue.
Sakuma, attaching importance to explicating the structural composition of sentences, proposed to allow for two important types of declarative sentence. These sentence types are referred to as shinasadame-bun (‘evaluative sentence’) and monogatari-bun(‘event sentence’). He characterizesshinasadame-bunas“the sentence whose function is to describe a property/state of a given entity or to express judg- ment”, andmonogatari-bunas“the sentence whose function is to describe an event that takes place”(Sakuma 1941:153).
Sakuma points out that the sentence types in question are not just conceptual but that they manifest themselves differently in their structural compositions. That is, the evaluative sentence takes the form(nani-nani) wa (koo-koo/nanika) da‘(such and such) is (such and such)’, where the beginning portion appears as the topic of the sentence (Sakuma 1941:155). The event sentence, on the other hand, takes the form (nani-nani) ga (dooka) suru/sita ‘(such and such) do/did (such and such)’, where in addition to the requirement that a verb should appear as the predicate,
“the specification of the temporal and spatial setting”is indispensable since “the description of an event would not be complete, if the temporal/spatial setting is not explicit”(Sakuma 1941:154). Thus, Sakuma draws attention to the fact that the dis- tinction between the evaluative sentence and the event sentence is reflected in their structural compositions. Particularly important is his observation that topicalization and temporal/spatial specification are involved in the evaluative sentence and the event sentence, respectively. In referring to the evaluative/event sentence distinc- tion, which plays a crucial role in this chapter, I will henceforth make use of the terms“property predication sentence”and“event predication sentence”.
To sum up, the points of Matsushita’s (1928) and Sakuma’s (1941) research are the following: (i) the notion of topic and that of subject are distinguished in Japanese, (ii) with respect to the topic/subject distinction, we can think of different language types: the Japanese type, which distinguishes topic and subject, and the English type, which does not make such a distinction, (iii) “the topic sentence”and “the topicless sentence”are differentiated in Japanese, (iv) the topic/topicless sentence dis- tinction is related to the known/unknown distinction, and (v) the evaluative sentence (property predication sentence) vs. event sentence (event predication sentence) dis- tinction has a bearing on whether a topic appears in a sentence or not.