Nakagawa Natsuko. Information structure in spoken Japanese: Particles, word order, and intonation

Language Science Press, 2020. — 318 р. — ISBN: 978-3-96110-138-2This book investigates the associations between information structure and lin-guistic forms in spoken Japanese mainly by analyzing spoken corpora. It pro-poses multi-dimensional annotation and analysis procedures for spoken corpora and explores the relationships between information structure on the one hand and particles, word order, and intonation on the other.
Particles, word order, and intonation in spoken Japanese have been investi-gated separately in dif f erent frameworks and in dif f erent subf i elds of the liter-ature; there was no unif i ed theory accounting for the all the phenomena. This book provides a unif i ed investigation of all the phenomena in question, by anno-tating all target expressions according to the same criteria and by investigating them all from the same analytical framework. Chapter 1 outlines the questions to be investigated in the study and introduces the methodology of the book. Chap-ter 2 reviews the literature on Japanese linguistics as well as the literature on information structure in dif f erent languages. Chapter 3 proposes the analytical framework of the book. Major f i ndings are discussed in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.
Chapter 4 analyzes the distributions of topic and case particles. It is made clear that so-called topic particles (wa, zero particles, toiuno-wa, and kedo/ga pre-ceded by copula) are mainly sensitive to the given-new taxonomy, whereas case particles (ga, o, and the zero particles) are sensitive to both focushood and gram-matical function. While the distinction between wa and ga has attracted much attention in traditional Japanese linguistics, this book analyzes the distribution of dif f erent kinds of topic and case particles, including zero particles.
Chapter 5 studies word order; more specif i cally, clause-initial, pre-predicate, and post-predicate noun phrases. Topical NPs appear either clause-initially or post-predicatively, while focal NPs appear pre-predicatively. Clause-initial and post-predicate NPs dif f er from each other mainly in their status in the given-new taxonomy. The previous literature investigated clause-initial, pre-predicate, and post-predicate constructions from dif f erent frameworks; however, there was no unif i ed account of word order in Japanese. The book outlines an account of word order in spoken Japanese within a unif i ed framework.