Topic-comment articulation in Japanese: A categorial approach

This paper deals with the topic-comment articulation of information structures conveyed by sentences. In Japanese, the topic marker WA is attached not only to an N(P) but also to a PP or a clause, forming the information structure of a sentence. where the topicalized part represents a restriction and the remaining part of the sentence represents a nuclear scope. I propose the type-raised category for WA which embodies flexible constituency to realize divergent topic-comment structures. With our categorial definition for the topic marker and the combinatory rules in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, which derive the tripartite representation of the information state of a sentence, our grammar architecture can dispense with an independent level representing the information structure.