Lastly, I would like to reconsider the issue (c) of 2.2, the relation between the topic/
topicless sentence distinction and the known/unknown distinction. In relation to this issue, I touched on Matsushita’s (1928) view in 2.1. There, I focused a spotlight on the side of the known/unknown distinction, since in the linguistics literature the notion of topic is generally discussed from the viewpoint of oldness/newness of information with emphasis on its relation to the notion of focus. Actually, depicting Matsushita’s (1928) view that way is one-sided.
In discussing the notion of topic, Matsushita took notice of its relevance to cognition (“judgment in thinking”, in his words) as well as its communicative function.
Maintaining that a topic sentence connects an entity and a specific judgment, he called attention to the cognitive aspect of the notion of topic. According to Matsushita (1928:713), the topic sentence sakura no hana wa sigatu no hazime ni sakimasu
‘cherry blossoms bloom in the beginning of April’, given above as (3) in 2.1, can be analyzed in such a way that“the notionsakura no hana(‘cherry blossoms’) is judged by means of the notionsigatu no hazime ni sakimasu(‘bloom in the beginning of April’)”.
After Matsushita, the communicative aspect and the cognitive aspect of the notion of topic have generally been discussed separately. For instance, Matsumura (1942) was concerned with the communicative aspect, as described in 2.2. Mio (1948), published in the same period, proposed a sentence type distinction calledhandan-bun (‘judgment sentence’) vs. genshō-bun (‘phenomenon sentence’), focusing on the cognitive aspect of the notion of topic. Another instance was Kuno (1972, 1973), also mentioned in 2.2, which was an attempt to explicate the communicative aspect of the notion of topic under the functional sentence perspective. Kuroda (1972), on the other hand, proposed a cognitively-based concept of the“categorical judgment vs.
thetic judgment” distinction on the basis of the judgment theory of the German philosophers Franz Brentano and Anton Marty. Here, a word is in order about Mio’s (1948) and Kuroda’s (1972, 2005) view.
Mio (1948) put forward the idea of distinguishing two types of sentence, i.e.
handan-bun(‘judgment sentence’) andgenshō-bun(‘phenomenon sentence’), under the influence of Matsushita. According to Mio, the judgment sentence takes a topic- comment structure, where“the topic is a problem to be solved”and“the comment is a solution to that problem”. For example,“in the judgment sentenceneesan wa gakkoo e ikimasita‘The elder sister went to school’, neesan wa‘elder sister TOP’
represents a problem such as where the elder sister went or where she is, andgakkoo e ikimasita‘school to went’represents a solution to the problem”(Mio 1948:88).
The phenomenon sentence, on the other hand, is characterized as“the sentence that describes an event as it is”(Mio 1948:83). It is realized as a topicless sentence, as exemplified by the sentenceame ga hutteru‘it is raining’, in which“ame ga‘rain NOM’is not a topic, hutteru‘is raining’does not provide a solution to a problem, nor is recognized a topic-comment unification based on subjective judgment”(Mio 1948:88). He thus made a clear distinction between the judgment sentence and the phenomenon sentence, which manifest themselves distinctively as a topic sentence and a topicless sentence.
Similar to Mio’s“judgment/phenomenon sentence”distinction is Kuroda’s (1972, 2005)“categorical/thetic judgment”distinction. Independently of Matsushita/Mio’s line of research, Kuroda, exploring the problem of the usage ofwa/ga, proposed to account for thewa/gadistinction in terms of the categorical/thetic judgment distinc- tion, founded on the ideas of Brentano and Marty.
Kuroda (1972: 8–11) explained the difference between the two types of judgment by way of the categorical judgment sentenceinu wa hasitteiru‘dog TOP is running’ (‘the dog is running’) and the thetic judgment sentenceinu ga hasitteiru‘dog NOM is running’(‘a dog is running’). He points out that in the former sentence, the speaker’s interest is directed toward a definite dog and a specific event is related to that dog, while the latter sentence is a simple description of an observed event. Although Kuroda did not use the term “topic”, the categorical judgment sentence and the thetic judgment sentence can be interpreted as a topic sentence and a topicless sentence, respectively. Note that while Mio attributes the topic/topicless contrast to the presence/absence of judgment, Kuroda attributes it to the difference between judgment types.
Regarding the relation between the sentence type distinction proposed by Mio/
Kuroda and the sentence classification on the basis of the predication type, mentioned earlier in 2.2 and 3.1, it can be said that the property predication sentence is a judgment sentence (categorical judgment sentence) and that the event predication sentence is either a phenomenon sentence (thetic judgment sentence) or a judgment sentence (categorical judgment sentence), depending on whether it is a topicless sentence or a topic sentence. So, we need to differentiate Mio/Kuroda’s judgment theory and the predication type theory. The point is that while the property predica- tion sentence is a judgment sentence (categorical judgment sentence), the event predication sentence is not necessarily a phenomenon sentence (thetic judgment sentence) (cf. Sasse 1987, Kageyama 2009).
I would like to recapitulate how I conceptualize the notion of topic. As described in 3.1.1, the notion of topic has its source in the composition of property predication.
That is, the“topic-comment”bipartite structure reflects the intrinsic feature of property attribution. This view bears a similarity to Kawabata’s (1976, 2004) claim, surveyed in 2.2, that the sentence type directly corresponding to judgment is“the adjective
sentence”, which is composed of the subject (“the topic”in our terminology) and the predicate.
In the property predication, the entity being predicated of is established prior to predication; in other words, the existence of a specific entity is presupposed in the predication concerned. Let us call this characteristic“given”. Although the concept of “given” is not necessarily uniform among linguists, I use this term to mean that the existence of an entity is determined. Matsushita’s (1928) concept of kitei (‘determined’) is understood as indicating “given” in this sense. The concept of
“given”, thus, is associated with the topic of the property predication sentence, but since the notion of topic is extended and generalized to the event predication,
“givenness”also applies to the topic of the event predication sentence.
In the current studies of information structure, the notion of topic is discussed in relation to that of focus from the perspective of the oldness/newness of information.
Different from that viewpoint, I attribute the notion of topic to the inherent charac- teristic of property predication. The concept of“given”is also construed as attribut- able to the nature of the entity being predicated of in property predication. That is, the notion of topic is not directly associated with the discourse context but rather is characterized in terms of the mode of judgment, which means that importance is attached more to the cognitive aspect of the topic than to its communicative aspect.
Let us now summarize what we have seen in 3.2. In the discussion of the notion of topic, both the aspect of communicative function and that of cognitive meaning come into view; the idea of“language as communication”and that of“language as thought” are compatible. On that assumption, we may ask which aspect is more important for the topic in Japanese. The answer to that question would be that for the topic in Japanese, the cognitive aspect is of more significance than the commu- nicative aspect, as argued by Mio and Kuroda; hence, we may say that the cognitive approach is more appropriate than the functional approach for the characterization of the topic in Japanese.
Linguistic research as represented by the theory of information structure generally approaches the issue of topic from the perspective of communicative function, taking its relation to the issue of focus into account. Under such circumstances, the judgment theoretic conception proposed by Mio and Kuroda provides a significant viewpoint for the linguistic investigation of the notion of topic (cf. Shibatani 1989).
4 Conclusion
The present chapter aimed to provide an overview of previous research on the topic and the subject in Japanese and to present some remarks on the topic/subject issue, based on that overview. The key concept in the remarks presented in section 3 was
“predication type”, which originates in the traditional studies of Japanese grammar.
The main points of the remarks in section 3 are the following.
(i) A topic-prominent language like Japanese and a subject-prominent language like English base the architecture of sentences on the property predication and the event predication, respectively. Also, the notions of topic and subject derive from the inherent characteristics of the two predication types.
(ii) The notion of topic and that of subject are not mutually exclusive in a language;
the covert subject and the covert topic are respectively allowed for in Japanese and English.
(iii) The notion of topic is associated with the aspect of communicative function and that of cognitive meaning; for the topic in Japanese, the cognitive aspect is more significant than the communicative aspect.
In this chapter, I have explored the possibility of building a bridge between the research by the traditional Japanese grammarians such as Matsushita, Sakuma, Mikami, Mio, and Kawabata, on the one hand, and current linguistic research on Japanese, on the other. Although the traditional research results, with the exception of Mikami, are rarely cited in the current studies of Japanese linguistics,13,14 there can be numerous points of contact between the traditional grammatical research and the current issues of Japanese linguistics, including the topic/subject issue. It is hoped that the domestic studies of Japanese grammar will contribute to the develop- ment of linguistic investigation through exchanges with the linguistic research con- ducted in the world.
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4 Toritate: Focusing and defocusing of words, phrases, and clauses
1 Introduction
This section explains whattoritateis and the importance of its study.