Topic-Comment Articulation: A Dynamic Syntax Approach to Information Packaging Hiroaki Nakamura The syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the topic marker "WA" has long been the central focus of research in Japanese linguistics, especially contrasting with the nominative marker "GA", but the two particles are fundamentally different in many respects. "GA" locally marks the subject (and the nominative object) in a clause, while "WA" follows postpositional phrases and clauses (in cleft sentences) as well as NPs, involving long-distance dependency. Assuming that topicless (all-focus) sentences are defaults and the primary function of "WA" is to 'defocus' an arbitrary constituent, splitting a sentence into two parts, Topic as the locus of update (corresponding to the restriction) and Comment as updating the context (corresponding to the nuclear scope), I will show how this information-structure partition can be represented in the incremental projection of logical form in Dynamic Syntax, progressively establishing a pair of LINKed structures, and extend this analysis to the use of "WA" as the contrastive topic or focal presupposition. |