Influence of Information Structure on Word Order Change and Topic Marker WA in Japanese

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of given-new ordering on word order change and topic marker WA, using a self-paced reading task. The results demonstrated that OACCSNOMV is sensitive to given-new information, but SNOMOACCV, STOPOACCV, and OTOPSNOMV are not. This fact can be explained by the Markedness Principle for Discourse Rule Violation (Kuno, 1987: 212): both SNOMOACCV and STOPOACCV are not penalized even when they violate given-new ordering because they are unmarked options, OACCSNOMV is penalized when it violates given-new ordering because it is a marked option, and OTOPSNOMV is penalized even when given-new ordering is preserved because it requires more contrastive contexts (McGloin, 1990:113). Another point is that topic marker WA is not responsive to the given-new distinction. This suggests that the usage of WA does not rely on anaphoricity in general. Note that there are two usages of WA: thematic topic needs to be previously mentioned while contrastive topic does not require anaphoricity. Taken together, we can conclude that the essence of WA is not thematic topic but contrastive topic.