What can Japanese -wa tell us about the function of Appendixes.

What can Japanese -wa tell us about the function of Appendixes

Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri*

1. INTRODUCTION: RIGHT TOPIC OR APPENDIX?

The aim of this paper is to provide some evidence from Japanese on the function of those postposed constituents (different from mere afterthoughts) that are sometimes qualified as Right Dislocations, Tails, Right Topics or Antitopics,1 sometimes as Appendixes. In most languages they are marked by prosodic features, mainly consisting in a flat contour which follows the contour expressing the illocutionary force of the utterance. This is what happens in (1) or (2), where the Appendix is given in italics and the word bearing the main prosodic prominence in capitals:2

(1) He is a nice GUY, your brother (2) PETER said it

Now, a flat contour is not an explicit signal that Appendixes should be functional/informational equivalents of Topics, since the contour of a default Topic (located to the left of the utterance, as in as for your brother / he is a nice guy) is far from being flat, and usually contains a relevant prominence.3 The different contours of Left Topics and Appendixes may thus be regarded either (a) as evidence that they have different illocutionary status; or (b) as simply the consequence of their being located in different places within the utterance, though having the same informational status. Or, even, something intermediate.

The controversy has been raised in these terms especially about spoken Italian, but it does have general relevance. Let us look at it more closely. The first * Università Roma Tre: [email protected]. The author wishes to thank Honoré Watanabe, Fuyuki Ebata, Iku Nagasaki, Isabel Alice Walbaum Robinson and an anonymous referee of Faits de Langues for reading the paper and giving precious suggestions. Of course he remains responsible for all errors contained in it. 1 This term is adopted by Chafe (1976) and Lambrecht (1981, 1994). 2 Exx. from Lambrecht (1994:203,200); the second originating from Otto Jespersen. 3 This has long been clear in the literature: cf. Bolinger (1958), Daneš (1967), Ladd (1978, 1996), Selkirk (1984), Pierrehumbert (1987), Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg (1990), Taylor (1992), Spencer (1996), and more recently, Tamburini (2006), Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl (2007), Féry & Krifka (2008), Breen et al. (2010), Lombardi Vallauri & Tamburini (2012), Lombardi Vallauri (in press), etc.

62 Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri

position is influentially held by E. Cresti, who proposes that Appendixes are Information Units with no relation to Topics, and should not be called (Right) Topics. Cresti’s definition of the utterance’s Topic and Comment is one of the most efficient ever formulated, and has given very important results on actual corpora of many (especially Romance) languages, leading a team of scientists to the consistent analysis of thousands of utterances in their informational and prosodic features (Cresti & Moneglia 2005, Raso & Mello 2012). According to Cresti (2000:70),4 while the Comment is devoted to the «accomplishment of the indispensable function of illocution», Topic and Appendix are «devoted to the accomplishment of different functions», namely the following:

Topic: «expressing the scope to which illocutionary force applies» Appendix: «textual integration of the Comment or the Topic»

In the same vein, much work by Ferrari (2004, 2007, in press) emphasizes the different functions of Appendixes as compared to Topics.5

Lombardi Vallauri (2008), to which I refer for more details, attempts to show that although the function of an Appendix may be quite different from that of a Left Topic as concerns its anaphoric/cataphoric relations to the rest of the utterance and to the following text, it is still a sort of Topic, not something completely different from it. The reason for saying so is that the property they share is a fundamental one. As a matter of fact, Appendixes share the main defining feature of the Topic, exactly in its definition given by Cresti herself, which I regard as the best to be found in the literature: namely that of being devoid of illocutionary force, merely providing the utterance with information whose function is that of allowing the understanding of the real message, which is carried out by the Comment/Focus.6

Now, the issue seems rather difficult to set on a formal basis within languages where this difference in information structure is formally marked exclusively by prosody, for prosody is not explicit enough. Some light on this may come from a language, like Japanese, where a specific segmental device (the particle wa) is devoted to the marking of Topics. If constituents dislocated to the right show more affinity with -wa marking than internal constituents, leading to cases where specific function markers (like «accusative» -ga or «dative/locative» -ni) are replaced by -wa, this may be interpreted as meaning that - at least in the sense associated to wa - they are Topics. Consequently we should call them Right Topics or the like, and if we wish to call them Appendixes, it need to be made clear that Appendixes are a particular kind of Topic, namely postposed Topics, which have their own features but are not a completely independent type of 4 As it can be seen, Cresti’s definition of Topic and Comment, which we adopt, is not a revolutionary one. Rather, in my opinion it represents the completion and clarification of those given by the Prague school (cf. Firbas 1966, Daneš 1974b, Sgall 1987) and subsequently, just to cite some, by Halliday (1985) or Lambrecht (1994). Translations are mine. 5 Ferrari’s work is very important in that it points out the different semantic impacts effected by Left Topics and Appendixes on the subsequent text. 6 It must be noticed that, as a consequence, both are not affected by the illocutionary change test (Lombardi Vallauri (1996b).

Japanese -wa and Appendixes 63

Information Unit. On the contrary, if there is no stronger tendency to mark them by wa as compared to internal constituents, this should mean that they are probably not Topics, and as a consequence, a denomination not containing the word «topic» should be strongly preferred, such as Appendix, along with the awareness that they constitute a third kind of Information Unit, on the same level with Topics and Focuses.

2. THE JAPANESE PARTICLE WA AS A TOPIC MARKER: TWO NOTIONS OF TOPIC

One of the most investigated features of the Japanese language is the explicit marking of Topics through the particle wa. Much has been written in contemporary linguistics on this particle and its functions. Most significant contributions to the issue were published during the Seventies and Eighties, such as for instance Kuno (1973), Martin (1975), Kuroda (1979), (Kitagawa 1982), Hinds (1987), Iwaichi (1987), Makino (1987), Simon (1989), and others. Much interest on wa has also been devoted to sociolinguistic aspects, such as the socio-situational conditions of its possible omission (cf. Takano 1998, Fry 2003), and on its acquisition. But theoretical contributions have continued to be pursued; cf. e.g. Portner & Yabushita (2001), Fiengo & McClure (2002), Kuroda (2005), Shimojo (2005, 2010), Nomura (2008), and others.

Before we allege the presence or absence of wa in postposed constituents as evidence that they may be Topics or not, we need to at least synthetically recall its properties as regards the concept(s) of «topic» that may be relevant to our issue.

The notion of Topic (or Theme) is not a simple and unproblematic one. Rather, under these terms, the literature has labelled quite different discourse and information functions, which can probably (at least for our present purposes) be summarized under two main types. In the words of Barry (1975):

One is the Prague school sense of theme (vs. rheme) as the element of the sentence contributing the least new information, usually because of its contextual dependence (...). This theme-rheme distinction, like Halliday’s given-new, is independent of the grammatical organization of the sentence (...). Such a context-dependent topic need not even be a constituent of the sentence (...). The second sense in which topic has been used is an equivalent to logical subject; the person or thing about which something is said. What is said is then the comment.

This picture summarizes the situation quite synthetically,7 although it may be argued (cf. e.g. Lombardi Vallauri 2001, 2009) that a distinction should better be kept between given-new on the one side and topic-focus (= theme/rheme) on the other, the former referring to different psychological states of activation of some content in the short-term memory of the participants (Chafe 1976, 1984, 1987, 1992), the latter referring to the linguistic presentation of the same content either as the aim of the message and carrier of its illocution (the Focus) or as a mere 7 A similar distinction is summarized e.g. in Downing (1991:122,127), who explicitly points out some possible confusions between the two concepts of topics in the works of M.A.K. Halliday.


semantic link to previous discourse (the Topic) (Cresti 2000, Lombardi Vallauri 2009).

The first notion of Topic is mainly a pragmatic one, pointing to the information status of a given content with respect to the flow of discourse. The second (cf. e.g. Lambrecht 1994:127) is mainly a semantic and syntactic one, pointing to the role of a certain constituent within the sentence as the one which the sentence is about. In ex. (3), discussed among others by Kuno (1973) and Kitagawa (1982), the first constituent (marked by wa) may be seen either as an «information status» Topic, pragmatic-contextual in nature, or as an «aboutness» Topic, semantic-syntactic in nature (the second constituent, marked by ga, is a focused subject, belonging to the predication). The same holds for (4):

(3) Sakana-wa tai-ga ii fish-TOP red-snapper-NOM good ‘As for fish, red snapper is the best’ (4) Are-wa Amerika ga warui that-TOP America-NOM bad ‘Speaking of that matter, America is to blame’

In ex. (5), discussed among others by Kuno (1973), Dik (1978) and Kitagawa (1982), the first constituent may be seen as a pragmatic-contextual extrasentential Topic, the second (marked by wa) as a semantic-syntactic intrasentential Topic (whilst in English it is merely a Subject):

(5) Inu to ieba, Taroo-wa pochi-o mita dog about speaking Taro-TOP Poochie-ACC saw ‘Speaking about dogs, Taro saw Poochie’

Obviously, different contexts may trigger different interpretations; but the cited authors are interested in defining the relevant categories of Information Structure rather than in assessing the nature of single examples. The two categories under examination are properly described, among others, by Dik’s notions of Theme (a predication-external constituent, representing «a universe of discourse with respect to which it is relevant to pronounce the following Predication»), and Topic (part of the predication itself, representing «the entity ‘about’ which the Predication predicates something»).8

According to Dik (1978:146), «both the Theme and the Topic may be marked by wa». However, although some decades have passed, we may still complain (with Kitagawa) that the problem of how exactly the presence of wa does contribute, if at all, to the characterization of the Theme and the Topic of Dik’s functional grammar is yet to be answered.9 More generally, the «wa» issue is far from closed and has always been controversial. If Kuno (1973), Martin (1975) and Hinds (1986, 1987) adopted the first notion of Topic in explaining Japanese 8 Cf. Dik (1978:130). The distinction, as noticed by Kitagawa (1982), though from a slightly different perspective, also resembles that between «discourse topic» and «sentence topic» in the works of Tanya Reinhart. 9 Kitagawa (1982:182).


wa, Kuroda (1979) adopted the second. Fiengo & Mc Clure (2002), using Austin’s theory of statements, describe wa as confined to «NPs that refer to given items», which locates them on the side of an Information Structure (thus, Theme) interpretation of wa. On the other side, Portner and Yabushita (2001) mainly identify -wa phrases with aboutness Topics; Kuroda (2005) strongly rejects the idea that the wa / ga distinction lies on a Discourse / Information Structure level and parallels that between Topic and Focus, by maintaining that «it is an issue in semantics»10.

We cannot resume the whole issue. Adopting Dik’s distinction, we qualify as iTopic the notion of Topic related to Information Structure, i.e. those discourse/pragmatic Topics which present their content as information already given in short-term memory, «continuous» in Givón’s terms,11 serving as an informational (known) starting point for the expression of the (new, unknown) Focus. And we qualify as aTopic the aboutness Topics, i.e. those syntactic/semantic Topics which express that their content has to be considered the conceptual/logical field for which the predication of the utterance holds.

It can be observed that the function of being an aTopic may not be in contrast with that of being an iTopic: on the contrary, the two functions may be concomitant and related to each other. In other words, semantic aboutness may arise from the informational status of being a Theme. The two levels, informational and semantic, may simply be involved in a phenomenon of interface. We will try to point out the intimate pragmatic relation that holds – in spite of their being conceptually different – between these two concepts of Topic in section 3 below.

We set aside here the issue of the use of wa in contrastive contexts (initiated by Kuno 1973), which would require too much further space. As pointed out for example by Shimojo (2005), a complete interpretation of -wa should jointly explain its contrastive and non contrastive uses. Such a problem still awaits solution. For our purposes, taking into account the role of wa in non-contrastive cases fits, because we are specifically interested in assessing the relationship between wa and Tails/Appendixes, where, as we will see in section 4.2, it always appears without the intonational emphasis required for contrastive interpretation (Vermeulen 2013:119). The literature (both on Tails and on wa) does not signal uses of wa with contrastive value in Tails. On the contrary, it is quite clear that contrastive wa operates on the illocution of the utterance (cf. e.g. Kuroda 2005, Endo 2007, Oshima 2008, Tomioka 2010), which is, by definition, never carried by Tails.

3. INTERFACE BETWEEN THE INFORMATIONAL AND THE SEMANTIC LEVEL

If -wa marked constituents were just aboutness Topics with no relation to being also information Topics, in principle they should have the same affinity with the statuses of informational Topic and Focus, because semantic expressions of

10 Kuroda (2005:15). 11 Cf. Givón (1983).


aboutness can obviously be focused. However, there is the widest agreement that (non contrastive) -wa constituents are usually not focused. Now, crucially, semantic aboutness can be a consequence of being informationally thematic. More specifically, in Japanese, precisely the fact that -wa marked NPs are iTopics encoding information presented as Given can result in their being interpreted semantically as aboutness aTopics. Fiengo & McClure (2002) propose the following examples, which they locate within John Austin’s quadripartite theory of statements (Austin 1953), respectively as a Calling and an Exemplifying act:

Are wa nan to iu hana desu ka? That one what flower is it called? (What is that flower called?) (6a) Ano hana wa sakura desu yo that flower cherry is ‘that flower is a cherry blossom’ Sakura to ume no chigai ga wakaranai no ne. Sakura o misete kurenai. I can’t tell the difference between a cherry and a plum blossom. Could you

show me a cherry? (6b) Ano hana ga sakura desu yo that flower GA cherry is ‘that flower is a cherry blossom’

It is not difficult to see that in (6a) hana is a previously introduced Given concept and, more importantly, it is presented as such, thus being a pragmatic iTopic, marked by -wa. In (6b) it is on the contrary a New concept, presented as such, thus constituting a Focus, marked by -ga. But it is also true that (6a) is about the aforementioned flower, while (6b) is not. Rather, (6b) is about «being a cherry».

In Austin’s theory, Calling and Exemplifying are opposite as concerns what he calls «direction of fit»: in Calling, the Predicate is produced to fit the Item; in Exemplifying, the Item is produced to fit the Predicate. As we have seen, in the first case the Item is marked (as the «target» of fitting) by wa. If Japanese was symmetrical in reflecting Austin’s classification of statements, it should have a means to mark the Predicate as the target of fitting in an Exemplifying act, by using wa or an equivalent marker. This is actually possible, provided that the predicate is nominalized:

(7) Kaetta no wa, John da (Fiengo & McClure 2002, fn. 8) return NOM is ‘about (the fact of) returning, it was John’ (The one who went home is John)

But the language is not limited to this symmetry, and there exists a different possibility, namely the one in (6b), where the predicate has no overt marking as a Topic (i.e. as the target of fitting), while the Item is marked as a non-Topic (i.e. as the fitting entity, with ga).

Things can also be seen the other way round: being informationally thematic can be a consequence of semantic aboutness. Maynard12 has proposed the notion 12 Cf. e.g. Maynard (1987, 1997).


of staging to describe the function of wa. In narratives, but also in other text genres, Maynard has demonstrated that the presence or absence of wa topicalization («thematization» in his words) serves the function of attributing to different referents different roles in subsequent discourse. Namely:

The thematized participants are expected to remain on stage for a longer period of time and this serves to provide points of reference for the development of the thematic flow. What the narrator wishes to accomplish through «staging» is to discriminate the thematized participants from non-thematized ones in such a way that thematized participants remain activated, evoked, and stored in the reader’s consciousness. In this way these participants serve to provide a flow of thought to which new and unexpected information may be integrated along the way. (Maynard 1987: 61)

The fact that a referent X remains «on stage», or activated, in discourse means that the discourse not only cursorily mentions that referent, but «is about» that referent. In Maynard’s view, marking by wa thus serves the function of telling the addressee: «pay attention, X is something which the present discourse is about». In other words, wa endows a referent with the function of an aTopic. Now, if a discourse is about X, that X enjoys «topic continuity» in Givón’s (1983) sense, i.e. it is something which is continuously recalled in discourse, by means of repeated mention, anaphoric expressions or zero. In other words, as Maynard himself adds in the second part of the quoted paragraph, that referent is something which, in every sentence in which it appears, counts as information already active in short-term memory, to which new information can be added. Maynard (1987:62) suggests that referents not marked by -wa are presented by the speaker «as not being currently activated in the reader’s consciousness». Thus, being a discourse aTopic typically causes being also an informational iTopic.13

These remarks can be considered as further evidence that wa marks Topics, even though the literature abundantly shows that coming up with a single, unambiguous and comprising definition of the functions of -wa Topics in Japanese remains difficult and can only be done if one decides to ignore a variety of problems that are still open. With this caveat, we will try to check whether Tails/Appendixes can be regarded as having more affinity to -wa marking than internal constituents.

4. PREFERENTIAL MARKING OF POSTPOSED CONSTITUENTS

4.1. -wa as Topic marker for subjects (Given or New)

Shimojo (2005), whose main concern about wa is to show its being the contrastive/cataphoric alternative to zero marking within a system of six argument encoding types for Subject and Direct Object, maintains that the two (wa and zero marking) basically alternate in Topic expressions. 13 In Maynard’s (1987:62) definition, referents not marked by -wa are presented by the speaker «as not being currently activated in the reader’s consciousness».


The data he provides are from a corpus of spoken Japanese constituted as follows: two-party informal conversations by eight pairs of native speakers (ten females and six males, aged 19 to 36, mostly from Kanto and Tokyo in particular) were both video- and audio-recorded at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. (From now on, we will refer to it as the SUNY Japanese corpus). Each pair’s conversation was about 30 minutes long, leading to 4 hours of conversation in total. The recorded conversations were transcribed and prepared in terms of clausal units by an experienced linguist. In particular, post-predicative units where transcribed with different marks of separation from the preceding linguistic material, according to relevant prosodic differences between the two types which we will distinguish in section 4.2. below, i.e. [+Pause] Afterthoughts and [-Pause] Tails proper.14

Some of the data in the SUNY corpus are quite significant to our issue. Not only do they show the «overwhelming overlap of discourse themes, or anaphorically salient referents, and subject arguments» and the fact that «wa-marking is clearly more frequent with subjects than with non-subjects» (Shimojo 2005:32). As concerns the correlation between recency of mention and different markings for Subjects (p. 83, Table), in the corpus wa is associated to recent mention even more strongly than the zero particle (though less than zero anaphora). Zero anaphors show the following frequencies: 92% of them are associated to high recency of mention (within 10 clauses), and only 8% to mention more than 10 clauses before or no mention at all. The zero particle features respectively 48% and 52% (slightly more frequent for unrecent or no mention), while 58% of wa occurrences are after recent mention, and 42% after nonrecent or no mention. This is summarized in Table 1.

recent mention

(< 10 clauses) preceding mention

> 10 clauses, or none zero anaphors 92 % 8% zero marking 48 % 52 % -wa marking 58 % 42 % -ga marking 26 % 74 %

Table 1: correlation between recency of mention and different markings for Subjects in the SUNY Japanese corpus (cf. Shimojo 2005)

Such frequencies are judged as low by Shimojo himself, who comments:

«Wa’s weak correlation with anaphoric saliency has been a puzzle in quantitative studies which attempt to associate wa with discourse topics». In fact, if constituents could be Topics only when encoding information which is bona fide Given, i.e. recently activated, this would be a problem. But it has been shown many times in the literature on Information Structure (cf. e.g. Halliday 1989, Lambrecht 1994, Lombardi Vallauri 2001 for explicit criticism), and it is implied 14 Cf. Shimojo (2005:55-59) for further details.


by Cresti’s definition of the Topic as just the part of the utterance that does not convey illocutionary force, that Topics encode information which is presented as no more to be activated by the hearer in his/her attention; not necessarily information which has actually been already activated. In other words, Topics may well include New information, not previously introduced, and present it as if it were already active. This is a common strategy in discourse, which may be attributed to the pressure of effort economy.

So, one always has to expect that in real interactions a fair amount of New information is conveyed by Topic constituents. Still, the correlation between a single construction and recent mention of its referents can perfectly count as a relative figure, allowing the comparison between different constructions within the same corpus: assuming that in the corpus the tendency to encode New information by way of Topics remains the same, it is wise to suppose that constructions more frequently associated to recent mention are those more strongly associated to the expression of Topic status, as compared to constructions less frequently associated to recent mention. A confirmation of this claim comes from the SUNY Japanese corpus itself, where the construction most frequently associated to recent mention is – absolutely not by chance – zero anaphora (92% with recent mention vs. 8% with no(n recent) mention, as we have seen), while on the opposite side we have -ga marked nominals, which are associated to mention within the preceding 10 clauses only in 26% of the cases, the remaining 74% being associated to less recent or no mention at all (cf. Table 1 above). In this picture, the fact that -wa marking comes second after zero anaphora in marking recently introduced constituents qualifies -wa as strongly associated to Topic marking.

In fact, as regards the expression of Information Structure wa is opposed to ga. As Shimojo puts it, «wa-marked referents tend to be given and ga-marked referents tend to be new»: a referent is initially introduced with ga, then the marking is shifted to wa to establish the topic».15

The comparison between the functions of wa and those of ga is probably the main vexata quaestio in contemporary Japanese linguistics. We cannot even imagine to resume it here. For our purposes, we just propose the following examples from the CALLHOME corpus of Japanese (telephone) speech:16

(8a) A: Sakki dareka kita? just.now somebody came ‘Did somebody come just now?’ B: Un, Kyoko (ga/*wa) kita yo. yeah Kyoko came EMPH ‘Yeah, Kyoko came’

15 Shimojo (2005:25-26). Throughout that book, the term «focusing» takes a different meaning from the one we are adopting here. Namely, it is used to refer to the cataphoric «announcement» that a certain (previously introduced) referent is being established as the Topic in the subsequent discourse. In this sense, it is applied also to wa. 16 Canavan & Zipperlen (1996); Wheatley, Kaneko & Kobayashi (1996). Cf. Nomura (2008:23-24) for further details.


(8b) A: Kazu kiteru? Kazu have.come ‘Has Kazu come?’ B: Aitsu (wa/*ga) kyoo kesseki da yo. that.guy today absent is EMPH ‘That guy’s absent today’

In (8a), the context makes clear that somebody has come, but nobody in particular is activated in speaker A’s mind. As a consequence, Speaker B must use the nominative marker ga for the person (s)he mentions. The use of the topic marker wa would be pragmatically odd. In (8b), instead, Speaker A’s utterance makes it clear that Kazu is fully active in her/his mind. Consequently, Speaker B replies by using the topic marker wa, and use of the nominative marker ga would be odd. In other words, «different activation states require different morphological markings» (Nomura 2008:5).

Although this is not our concern here, it must be noticed that the function of

ga, i.e. «introducing a referent as New (non-active in attention)», is in strict correlation to what characterizes the Comment (the Focus, in others’ terminology) in the definition by Cresti, which we adopt. The part of the utterance which has illocutionary force presents itself as the one that conveys the purpose of the message, sharing information with the hearer. Now, the aim of the message is typically to convey information that is not yet known to the hearer. Thus, information in Focus is presented as New (no matter whether it really is or not), and information in Topic is presented as Given (though it may actually also be New; cf. Lombardi Vallauri 2001, 2009).

Shimojo (2005) points out that progression from -ga first introduction to zero anaphora can skip -wa marking, since a referent can be directly referred to by a zero anaphora after first introduction. This very clearly observable fact also means that the same informational status (recent introduction) allows a referent to be encoded with wa or as a zero anaphora. In other words, wa and zero anaphora both present a certain content as already Given, and thus as no longer belonging to the informational aim of the message. That is to say, as having status of Topic rather than Focus.17

It would be impossible to set the question of the very nature of wa here. For

our pourpose we can be content of having strengthened, by means of some quantitative data from the cited corpus of conversational Japanese, the hypothesis (predominant in the literature) that wa marks iTopics, i.e. (to follow Cresti’s definition) that it is used to present a constituent as the part of the utterance conveying Given information, devoid of illocutionary force, to which the 17 Wa and zero anaphora have quite different functions from other respects, for instance as concerns the consequences of their use as to establishing a certain content as a stable Topic in the suite of the discourse. Shimojo adopts quite a different concept of Topic from ours, and as a whole quite a different perspective, which leads him to describe the use of wa in different terms. But, though it is not possible to show this in detail here, our analysis is not in contrast with his.


illocutionary force carried by the Focus/Comment applies. This is what we tried to do in this section.

4.2. -wa in Japanese Tails

Japanese sentences can present postverbal constituents which are often called Tails in the literature (the Body being the preceding sentence). Since Japanese is an SOV language, a constituent following the Verb is external to the sentence. This is exemplified in (9), (10) and (11):18

(9) Sugoku kireina doresu o mita no, Ginza de too pretty dress-ACC saw Ginza-in ‘(I) saw a very pretty dress, in Ginza’ (10) anoo, koo iu fuu ni sagatta no ga kawaisoo da toka uh this say way to bowed the-fact-that NOM pitiful is or omowanai deshoo, nihonjin wa think-not presumptive Japanese-people ‘Don’t (they) think it’s a shame when (they) bow like this, the Japanese’ (11) niwa haki shitotta desu, hajimete itta, itta toki wa garden sweep did COP beginning go-PAST go-PAST moment ‘I swept the garden, I went for the first time, the moment I went.’

It is clear that such Tails are equivalent to what we have also called Right Topics or Appendixes in Section 1 above. Like Right Topics / Appendixes, they are typical of, if not virtually limited to, the spoken language. Maynard (1989:36) observes that by means of postposed constituents speakers convey «presupposed» information in order to allow the hearer to understand the information conveyed by the rest of the utterance (which matches Cresti’s definition of Topics given above). Shimojo (2005:83) provides statistical data on the correlation between recency of mention and different markings for Subjects that confirm this interpretation. In the SUNY Japanese corpus, postpredicative constituents are associated to recent mention even more strongly than -wa marked constituents (though less than zero anaphoras): constituents in Tails come after recent mention in 75% of the cases, while only 25% of them follow nonrecent or no mention.

recent mention

(< 10 clauses)preceding mention

> 10 clauses, or noneTails 75 % 25 %

Table 2: correlation between recency of mention and Tail constituents in the SUNY Japanese corpus (cf. Shimojo 2005).

18 From actual situations. Respectively ex. (22) reported by Simon (1989:163), ex. (23) by Hinds (1986:161), and ex. (24) from the The «GSR-JD» Spoken Japanese Dialect Corpus collected at the Machine Intelligence and Biomedical Engineering Laboratory of the University of Tsukuba, which consists of natural conversations between the reseacher and the informant or among the informants (133 people from nine different places in the country). The speaker of (24) is from Toyama.


The prosodic realizations of Tails studied in Japanese match those usually described for Appendixes in languages such as English and Italian. Simon (1989:179) agrees with Clancy (1982) that they are produced «with lower, level pitch on the postposed constituent». According to Nomura (2008:25) «a sentence-final tone occurs at the left edge of the Body, followed by a low tone throughout the Tail».

Shimojo (1995) agrees that in Japanese constructions involving a postverbal constituent the predicate in the Body is most likely to be New, and to be followed by a Given Tail, which he regards as evidence for the defocused status of the Tail position. Kaiser (1999:110-111;116) suggests that Japanese postposed constituents are Tails in Vallduví’s (1992:48) sense, in that «they cannot be foci, since they never contain new information of primary importance, such as the answer to an information question, an item with an exhaustive-listing reading, or a wh-phrase». She also observes (123-24) that when ga expresses exhaustive listing (as in (12), due to superlative meaning) it is incompatibile with being in Tail, where wa on the contrary would fit:

(12a) * Sekai ichi-no dai tokai da yo, Tookyoo ga world one-GEN big city be-EMPH Tokyo-NOM ‘It is the biggest city in the world, Tokyo (and only Tokyo)’ (12b) Sekai ichi-no dai tokai da yo, Tookyoo wa world one-GEN big city be-EMPH Tokyo-TOP ‘It is the biggest city in the world, Tokyo’

The defocused nature of Tails is shown also by the fact that when the context constrains a constituent to be focused (for ex. as the answer to a wh-question), its appearing in the Tail results in strong oddity:19

(13) A: Taroo wa Hanako to doko e itta no? Taroo Hanako-with where-to went ‘Where did Taroo go with Hanako?’ B: ? Kare wa Hanako to itta // Kyooto e. he Hanako-with went Kyooto to ‘He went with Hanako, to Kyoto’

In principle, it is expected that if a Tail contains a direct object, or an oblique to be marked as a Genitive, a Locative or similar, constituents will be marked according to their semantic functions (cf. ex. 9). Sells (1999:5) argues that «postposing (...) directly retains the in-situ form of the postposed element». This is shown in (15) where Tails are extracted from (14) (Nomura 2008:2):

(14) Hanako ga kooen de Taro o kusugutta yo. Hanako-NOM park in Taro-ACC tickled EMPH ‘Hanako tickled Taro in the park’ (15) a. Kooen de Taro o kusugutta yo // Hanako ga. b. Hanako ga Taro o kusugutta yo // kooen de. c. Hanako ga kooen de kusugutta yo // Taro o.

19 Ex. from Takami (1995:160), quoted by Nomura (2008:16).


In the case of the Subject, Japanese must choose between marking it as topical information with wa (or zero marking) or as focal information with ga. Thus, in order to assess what the information status of a Tail is, the presence of the one or the other of these markers may be decisive. Hinds (1986:161) claims the following:

There is a structure in Japanese termed «postposing» [...]. This structure allows elements to be placed after the sentence final verbal. [...] Frequently, wa marked noun phrases are «moved» to sentence final position with this structure.

As far as I know, the last claim, and more precisely the meaning of the adverb «frequently» used there, has not been tested much. The most significant exception to this is Shimojo (2005), where accurate counts were made on the SUNY Japanese corpus. As we have seen, both wa and zero marking of NPs appearing in Tails seem to mark their contents as already introduced and non focal. According to Shimojo, the difference is that wa is used when a referent is in a contrastive relation with others, while zero marking denotes no contrast. In addition, wa is used to cataphorically establish a referent as a Topic for the subsequent discourse, while zero marking does not work cataphorically, rather signaling its referent as already established as a Topic.

Due to the purpose of his study, Shimojo only considered constituents in Tails marked by wa and zero whose role was that of a Subject.20 But Tails can contain constituents marked by -wa also when their specific semantic role is different from that of a Subject, and one that could be marked more explicitly by another particle. This is what we can observe in the following utterance from a corpus of spontaneus speech,21 where -wa was actually produced in conversation, but also the more explicit alternative -de (expressing location of a process) would have been possible for the constituent in the Tail:

(16) okome ga mochiron dekin desho, koko wa rice NOM of course cannot COP here ‘as you know, rice is not produced, here’

We will try to extend the analysis to such syntactic conditions in section 4.3.

4.3. An experiment on the affinity of Tails to wa

Following the literature, we have considered wa as a Topic marker that alternates with the Focus marker ga for syntactic Subjects. For sure, this is a very frequent pattern (cf. Fry 2003:122; Shimojo 2005:32). Much less frequent is the presence of Tail constituents. And among them, even less frequent is -wa marking for syntactic functions different from Subject. Still, it is interesting to consider to what extent wa can appear in Tails when these contain constituents with other 20 To be precise, Shimojo also deals with the N1 – N2 Japanese construction, where two nominals appear with Subject-like functions. 21 From the cited «GSR-JD» Spoken Japanese Dialect Corpus. The speaker here is from Nara.


syntactic functions. Unlike Subjects, the expression of other syntactic roles must undergo full semantic and syntactic neutralization if marked only by -wa, because the specific relations they convey (Object, Dative, Locative etc.) remain unexpressed by -wa, and must be recovered from the semantic content of the utterance and from the context. If, this notwithstanding, other constituents can lose the explicit marking of their syntactic roles when Right-dislocated, and assume generic -wa marking as Topics, this fact, of course, will further speak in favour of a characterization of Tails as Topics.

As we said, the rarity of the phenomenon makes it difficult to retrieve quantitatively significant data on its extension for syntactic roles different from that of Subject. Moreover, while each occurrence of a Tail marked by -wa in a corpus speaks in favour of that Tail’s status as a Topic, the absence of -wa and the presence of some semantically more specific (Object or Oblique) particle cannot be counted as proving that the Tail is no Topic, because it can simply reflect the preference of the speaker for expressing more explicitly the syntactic/semantic role of that constituent within the utterance.

For example, the recording of a conversation from a corpus of spontaneous spoken Japanese22 contains the following utterances where the syntactic functions of the constituents in Tails are marked by their explicit, specific markers:

(17a) Kondo yaroo yo, Scrabble o sometimes let’s play EMPH ACC ‘Sometimes let’s play, Scrabble’ (17b) Tonikaku shabette hoshii no ne, ano, kotoba de Anyway talking want er... dialect in ‘Anyway, I wanted (them) to talk, er... in (their) dialect’

Now, the corpus as such cannot tell us if in the same contexts the similar utterances in (18a-b), with -wa either replacing or supplementing the specific case markers, would be acceptable to the same speakers in the same context:

(18a) Kondo yaroo yo, Scrabble wa sometimes let’s play EMPH ‘Sometimes let’s play, Scrabble’ (18b) Tonikaku shabette hoshii no ne, ano, kotoba de wa Anyway talking want er... dialect in ‘Anyway, I wanted (them) to talk, er... in (their) dialect’

Conversely, the same corpus contains the following utterances where the presence of -wa marking for a direct Object and a Locative can be interpreted as their being Topics:

(19a) Kinoo yonda yo, Tanaka san ga kaita ronbun wa yesterday read-PAST EMPH NOM write-PAST paper ‘I read (it) yesterday, the paper that Tanaka wrote’

22 The utterances belong to a corpus of about 2 hours informal conversation between four female graduate students resident in the United States, all native speakers of Japanese (cf. Simon 1989:6,10-11,172).


(19b) Kaki to ieba, New Orleans na no yo, kono kuni de wa oysters speak-if is EMPH this country LOC ‘Speaking of oysters, it is New Orleans, in this country’

But the corpus cannot tell us whether the uttering of (20a-b), where the explicit marking for the syntactic/semantic function of the same constituents is neither replaced nor supplemented by -wa, would be accepted by the same speakers:

(20a) Kinoo yonda yo, Tanaka san ga kaita ronbun o yesterday read-PAST EMPH NOM write-PAST paper ACC ‘I read (it) yesterday, the paper that Tanaka wrote’ (20b) Kaki to ieba, New Orleans na no yo, kono kuni de oysters speak-if is EMPH this country LOC ‘Speaking of oysters, it is New Orleans, in this country’

For this kind of reasons, in order to collect a fair amount of more explicit data, we used a test designed to allow virtually all particles that were possible in a given context to actually appear. Of course tests, by making up artificial contexts, cannot be considered as revealing the simple truth about spontaneous linguistic behaviours; but if one is aware of that and does not overestimate their possible outcomes, from some respects and to some extent they can give useful information.

The experiment was designed to elicit tendencies, on the part of speakers, on how to mark Tails containing a non-Subject constituent. Informants were 20 Japanese (mainly from Tokyo, all living there), between 19 and 65 years of age (the majority between 20 and 26), with a high level of education (university students or graduates, professors and administrative employees). They did the test in a quiet room where they were left alone for the time they needed. The test was submitted in written form, consisting of 4 sheets of paper containing a series of 24 linguistic contexts, with gaps after the full words to be filled with the particles. Each informant was instructed to fill the gaps with the particles she or he considered possible in each context. Apart from the fact that free multiple choice was allowed, no suggestion was given as to what should be put in each gap.

Informants were told to consider the examples as spoken language although materially they were submitted in written form.23 Contexts were kept syntactically as simple as possible, in order to minimize possible influence of factors different from those under examination. They typically contained a sentence with an in situ NP, which in the following sentence re-appeared within a Tail, as in Nomura’s (2008) examples we have reported in (14) and (15). This is exemplified here below in (21-24). In the first sentence the NP was regularly marked by some particle expressing Direct Object, Location, Movement, and the like. The informants were asked to fill the gap for the particle in the second sentence. Here are some examples. The possible pragmatic oddness of such utterances was 23 Obviously, the capacity to react to a written stimulus by giving responses truly corresponding to one’s spoken habits may vary from one informant to the other, and probably was never complete.


pointed out to the informants in advance, and they were instructed to imagine communicative situations where the utterances could actually be used, in order to fill in the most suitable particle.

(21) - yakitori o tabeta ka? - hai, tabeta, yakitori ____. yakitori-ACC ate Q yes ate yakitori ‘did you eat yakitori?’ ‘yes, I ate, yakitori’ (22) - Pari e ikimashita ka? - iie, ikemasen deshita, Pari ____. Paris-to went Q no go-POT-NEG-POL Paris ‘did you go to Paris?’ ‘no, I couldn’t go, to Paris’ (23) - Rooma de Tanaka san ni aimashita ka? - hai, aimashita, Rooma ____. Rome-in Tanaka-Mr with meet Q yes met Rome ‘have you met Mr. Tanaka in Rome?’ ‘yes, I’ve met him, in Rome’ (24) - Maguro wa suizokukan ni imasu ka? - hai, imasu, suizokukan ____. Tuna-TOP aquarium-in exist Q yes exist aquarium ‘are there tunas at the aquarium?’ ‘yes, there are, at the

aquarium’

Some contexts were also included where the role of the constituent which returned in the Tail was that of a Subject. Their main function was that of «fillers», to vary the tasks to informants, so that they were not caught in the automatic routine of simply mechanically re-proposing in the Tail the same particle they had found in the preceding stimulus. In these cases, informants were asked to fill the gap for the particle also in the sentence where the relevant constituent appeared in situ, since for Subjects Japanese has the alternative between wa and ga. It must be noticed that informants consistently marked with ga the in situ Subjects which had not been introduced before (as kuruma in 25a), and with wa those that had been introduced by a previous sentence (as in 26a); but this, though obviously expected and even welcome, was not our main concern.

(25) - Tanaka san wa kite imasu ka? Tanaka-Mr coming-exist Q ‘has Mr Tanaka arrived?’ a. - Iie, kuruma ____ kowarete imasu no, car breaking-exist ‘no, the car is broken’ b. - Iie, kowarete imasu, kuruma ____. no, breaking-exist car ‘no, it is broken, the car’ (26) - Tanaka san wa kuruma de kite imasu ka? Tanaka-Mr car-with coming-exist Q ‘has Mr Tanaka arrived by car?’ a. - Iie, kuruma ____ kowarete imasu no, car breaking-exist ‘no, the car is broken’


b. - Iie, kowarete imasu, kuruma ____. no, breaking-exist car ‘no, it is broken, the car’

It may be useful to notice that the test has been designed to contain postposed consituents that were not Afterthoughts, which would have lead to something completely different from topical tails. This was obtained by introducing the same content in the preceding context.24 Typically, Afterthoughts in the strict sense are «unplanned» postposings, that is to say, «repairs of inappropriate omissions» (cf. Nomura 2008:11-15). In other words, they are produced as a Tail in order to introduce information that the speaker had failed to recall in time when producing the body of the utterance. So, if on the contrary (as in our test) the context immediately preceding the utterance contains that information, this excludes the interpretation of the postposed constituent as an Afterthought.

To be sure, informants were subsequently asked to read the utterances aloud, and were recorded. The vast majority of postposed constituents received the prosodic pattern which Nomura (2008:3,16,27-28) reports as the [-Pause] type, having the function of «defocusing» the postposed constituent. On the contrary, Afterthoughts – beside having a different pitch contour – are [+Pause], i.e. they are preceded by an identifiable pause.

The experiment gave the following results. As for case particles such as -o, -e,

-de, -ni, in the majority of cases the informants repeated them in the Tail exactly as they had found them in the previous sentence; but not always. In some cases, they were replaced in the Tail by another particle. Such substitutions are shown in Table 3, where figures are approximated to the nearest integer. Percent sums must be understood as referred to the total number of the test inputs with that particle. Their sums reach more than 100 as a result of the fact that multiple choices were allowed, i.e. an informant could give, say, both ni and wa as an answer in the same context. For example: all informants chose de for Tails when the in situ particle was de (100 %), but in 30 % of the answers de wa was also given as possible. Out of 60 answers given by the 20 informants for 3 contexts with -o as the in situ particle, -o was chosen for the Tail in 47 cases (78 %), and -wa in 27 cases (45 %). This means that in 33 cases -o was the only answer, in 13 cases -wa was the only answer, and in 14 cases the answer was both -o and -wa. Out of 120 answers given by the 20 informants for 6 contexts with -ni as the in situ particle, -ni was chosen for the Tail in 107 cases (89 %), and -ni wa in 50 cases (42 %). In the case of -e, when present in the preceding context this particle was selected in slightly more than one third of the cases (42 instances, 35%): significantly for our issue, the informants chose -wa and -e wa almost the same number of times (40 instances each, 33%): in addition, also ni was chosen (7 times, 8%), and, also very significantly, -ni wa (46 times, 55%).

24 As it can be seen in the tested utterances, the postposed content is present in the preceding context, not in the body of the same utterance, otherwise it would constitute what Nomura (2008:19) calls a «repetition», whose function is mainly that of emphasizing a content immediately after its introduction «by repeating it in the same utterance».


IN SITU PARTICLE PARTICLES CHOSEN FOR THE TAIL o (Object) 60 contexts

o 47 = 78% wa 27 = 45%

e (Direction) 120 contexts

e 42 = 35% wa 40 = 33% e wa 40 = 33%

ni 7 = 8% ni wa 46 = 55%

de (Action-in-Place) 80 contexts

de 80 = 100% de wa 37 = 30%

ni (Location) 120 contexts

ni 107 = 89% ni wa 50 = 42%

Table 3: change of particles from in situ to Tail position (percents approximated).

More in detail this means, for instance, that in almost 80% of the contexts presenting in situ the Object particle o, answers such as (21a) were given where the particle was maintained in the Tail; but in about 45% of the cases wa was selected as possible in the Tail (as in 21b), usually in addition to o as a further possibility, but in about 20% of the cases alone:

(21a) - yakitori o tabeta ka? - hai, tabeta, yakitori o . (21b) - yakitori o tabeta ka? - hai, tabeta, yakitori wa .

Similarly, in about 35% of the contexts presenting in situ the «Direction» particle e, answers such as (22a) were given where the particle was maintained in the Tail; but in almost the same amount of cases wa was selected in the Tail, usually in addition to e as a further possibility (22b).

(22a) - Pari e ikimashita ka? - iie, ikemasen deshita, Pari e . (22b) - Pari e ikimashita ka? - iie, ikemasen deshita, Pari wa .

Most interestingly, informants proposed a similar percent of e-wa, where the informational (topicalizing) content of wa is added to the semantic content of e (22c):

(22c) - Pari e ikimashita ka? - iie, ikemasen deshita, Pari e-wa .

Also the other locative particle, ni, was substituted for e, less than in 10% of the cases (22d). But in more than half of all the cases informants proposed ni-wa (22e):

(22d) - Pari e ikimashita ka? - iie, ikemasen deshita, Pari ni . (22e) - Pari e ikimashita ka? - iie, ikemasen deshita, Pari ni-wa .

All this shows that a substitution for the particle used in situ when the constituent is moved to Tail position is not only possible but quite frequent – relative to the general low frequency of the Tail construction. When a change is possible, by far the main pattern is that any other particle may either be replaced by wa, or be


supplemented by wa. In other words, informants showed a strong tendency towards including wa in Tails, either as and additional marker or as a substitute for a semantically more specified particle.

It must also be mentioned that in subsequent comments many informants signaled zero marking as possible (though implying a shift in the formality level of the utterance) in the Tail where the in situ position was occupied by wa, ga or o (cf. also Shimojo 2005 for similar conclusions from data of the SUNY corpus). This can be interpreted, in the same way as wa, as a signal of Topic status of the Tail. As is well known, spoken Japanese has the possibility of particle dropping, related to sociolinguistic variables. The particles wa, ga and o can be optionally omitted in informal speech, provided that their referents are not in Focus. The frequency of such substitutions in our corpus cannot be considered as significant, precisely because when it does not occur this may simply be due to the tendency of the informant to keep a more formal level,25 not necessarily to the non-topical status of the -ga or -o marked constituents. But the very fact that zero marking is possible in Tails means that they are not focused constituents.

Summarizing, we can observe that Tails can obviously contain a specific particle (-o, -e, -de, -ni) marking their syntactic role in the «scene» described by the utterance, exactly as when the same constituent appears in the Body of the sentence. Still, the expression of this specific information can optionally be entrusted to the discourse context when the constituent is moved to Tail position. Significantly, in this case the specific function marker can be replaced by -wa or zero marking. This signals the Tail position as Topic. The possibility to add -wa after the specific marker (-e, -de, -ni) confirms this conclusion.

4.4. Further data supporting the hypothesis

Many informants pointed out that the choice between wa and zero marking in the Tails corresponded to respectively expressing that the relevant constituent was contrasted to some other or not. This is in perfect accordance with the analysis of Shimojo (2005) which we have already hinted at, and to which we refer. We can add that, as is well known, when two different formal devices are available in the same function, they tend to specialize for different subfunctions. Now, obviously, if one is more explicit than the other, as wa compared to zero, the former tends to assume the marked function. So, it is quite natural for N-zero to simply mention a referent, and for N-wa to also mark it as contrasted with respect to other possible referents. But, as already mentioned, all this presupposes that they operate in the same function. As a consequence, all evidence supporting the interpretation of one of them as expressing Topic status can be regarded as also holding for the other. Which reinforces the interpretation of both zero and -wa marking as expressing Topic status.

Although his work does not deal with Oblique constituents such as those tested in our experiment, Shimojo (2005) provides a great amount of data which 25 Also the different levels of formality of the sentences themselves (polite or non-polite forms) obviously played a role. Most sentences where formulated in the formal style, precisely to maximize the chanches for wa to appear.


confirm the tendency of wa to appear more frequently in Tails. As he puts it, in the SUNY corpus (p. 65) «the post-predicative arguments are found with three post-nominal encoding types – the zero particle, wa, and ga. (...) In terms of the token frequency by encoding type, the zero particle is the most frequent and ga is the least frequent.» Actual figures are the following.

overall frequency frequency in Tails-ga 9% 11%-wa 7% 19%zero particle 18% 77%

Table 4: frequencies (overall and in Tails) of different markings for Subjects in the SUNY Japanese corpus.

While in overall frequencies ga beats wa by 9% vs 7%,26 when it comes to Tails wa represents 19% of the total, and ga only 11%.27 Such percentages are affected by the fact that zero anaphora is excluded by definition from postposed constituents.28 So, its place is left free to the other encoding systems. The zero particle takes its place in Shimojo’s corpus, increasing from its 18% in overall counts to 77% in postposing. Ga essentially does not increase, but wa almost triplicates its presence. Once again, data must be evaluated in a comparative perspective. The difference between preverbal Subjects and postverbal Subjects thus appears to be clearly as follows: in postverbal position there is less -ga marking, while there is much more zero particle and -wa marking.

Finally, it must be noticed that the presence of some constituents marked by ga in Tails is not to be regarded as excluding that Tails are Topics. The extreme rarity of -ga marking in such contexts, and its giving place to wa in many occasions, rather speaks in favour of the hypothesis that ga, as a Nominative marker, when in a position which is unmarked as regards information structure, such as preverbal position, expresses Focus status as opposed to wa’s expressing Topic status; but when this function is in contrast with appearing in a position already marked for Topic status such as in Tails, ga only keeps its (more essential) Nominative function, the focusing function being overridden. In this respect, we agree for instance with Heycock (2008:58-63), who remarks that -ga marked subjects in a variety of environments are not interpreted as focused. In fact, even if ga usually presents its referent as newly introduced, this meaning is bound to drop when the referent itself has been recently introduced, as is typically the case with Tails. In any case, as we have shown, a much more frequent alternative is that ga is simply avoided in favor of the zero particle or wa. 26 Frequencies of the other encoding types for Subjects and Objects in Shimojo’s (2005) corpus are: Zero anaphora 64%, zero particle 18%, Accusative -o 2%. 27 Percents for the frequency of wa and ga in postposed constituents have been calculated for the purpose of the present article, extracting the data from Shimojo’s absolute figures appearing in tables with slightly different aims. 28 Zero anaphora is devoid of sense in postposed constituents, because it requires a full syntactic clause in order to be identifiable. In other words, a postposed constituent made of a zero anaphora would be a «zero» postposed constituent, equal and not recognizable from no constituent at all.


5. CONCLUSIONS

The interpretations of the results from the SUNY Japanese corpus (Shimojo 2005) and from the substitution test we have exposed seem (a) to confirm that wa is a marker of Given iTopics (its semantic aboutness value being possibly a consequence of its information status); (b) to show that Tails/Appendixes have an affinity with wa, which manifests itself in the fact that wa (and almost only wa) can appear within Tails in the place of Oblique particles which appear if the constituent in the same syntactic role appears in situ. Data on Subject marking from extensive corpuses examined in the literature go in the same direction.

If it is true that wa (or zero marking) can replace ga and semantically more specific – Oblique -markers due to the topical environment represented by Tails, this may account for Hinds’ (1986) statement we quoted above, hinting at the high frequency of wa in postposed constructions. Demonstrations beyond any doubt are not always available in linguistics. This was actually not our ambition. Still, the data and arguments we have proposed may be considered as further evidence pointing at the conclusion that – not only in Japanese – Appendixes are Topics.

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What can Japanese -wa tell us about the function of Appendixes.

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