A Study of the Topic of Sentences

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  • トピックについての一考察

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"Although many studies have been made on the topic of Japanese sentences, there is room for further consideration. This paper is an attempt at giving a new position to the topic in Japanese sentences. It may be said that the particle wa used for marking a topic acts as proxy for various case particles by noting the relation between the topic and a comment. And the difference between the wa and especially the particle ga which, in general, indicates the nominative case seems to be revealed by reconsidering the relation between a comment sentence and a phenomenon-describing sentence. In this paper, it is tentatively shown, quite differently from the traditional way of considering the sentence structure, that the wa-marked topic can be connected with a comment by the medium of a new concept, ""Saucer."" This concept may help us identify a topic. A topic marked by wa and a Saucer have a tendency to require the Saucer after a comment and da ; therefore the comment, for example, beginning with a ga-marked word, may be said to be subordinated to the Saucer, and also to be separated from the topic. It may be concluded that the [......wa......da] construction, which seems to be valid in many sentences, is one of the prototypical structures of Japanese sentences, although the number of example sentences considered here is small and many problems still confront us. "

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