On Japanese Definite NPs: A Reply to Portner and Yabushita

In their paper in Linguistics & Philosophy on the semantics and pragmatics of topic phrases, Portner and Yabushita (1998) propose a theory of Extended File Change Semantics that is able to account for a range of topicalization phenomena in Japanese and English. One particular phenomenon—the one that Portner and Yabushita dwell on the longest—is their observation that, in Japanese, “a discourse entity can be most readily picked out with information that has been attributed to it while it is the topic.” They formalize this observation into a felicity condition, the Strong Familiarity Condition, on Japanese definite NPs. According to Portner and Yabushita (henceforth, P&Y), this empirical observation about Japanese has the following implication for semantic theory: In order to enforce the Strong Familiarity Condition on Japanese NPs, a semantic theory requires some mechanism like file cards (Heim 1982; Vallduvı́ 1992) for connecting up the information established in a discourse with those individuals that the information is ‘about’. Theories that have such a mechanism (e.g. Vallduvı́’s and P&Y’s) are superior in this respect to theories that lack one (e.g. focus-based approaches like von Fintel’s (1994) or Roberts’ (1996)), because the latter are presumably unable to account for the Japanese data. We believe that this conclusion about competing semantic frameworks is premature, because we see no evidence, either in P&Y’s paper or in our own corpus study, that the Japanese phenomenon in question really exists. We suggest that P&Y’s data can be explained without the use of file cards or similar devices, using well-known linguistic principles of greater robustness and generality than the Strong Familiarity Condition.