Satoshi Tomioka

Japanese is known to have rich encoding of information structure in its grammar. Focus and givenness can be prosodically marked, and there are syntactic structures that are sensitive to information structure, such as cleft sentences, right dislocation, and a variety of phonologically silent structures. This chapter introduces core empirical facts surrounding Japanese information structure, which form the basis of numerous theoretical endeavours. Special attention is paid to the properties of wa-marked phrases. While the particle wa is closely tied to the notion of ‘aboutness’ topic, it has other uses that are not obviously connected to aboutness. The grammar of wa-marking also figures prominently in the discussion of a few additional issues that the chapter addresses, namely contrastiveness and its possible link to scalar implicature, and the recursively/embeddability of topicality in the context of ‘embedded root phenomena’.

Sloppy identity under ellipsis is generally attributed to the pronoun in ellipsis being a bound variable. However, sloppy identity can be licensed in structural configurations in which variable binding is ordinarily blocked. This paper provides a solution for this mismatch by reanalyzing the pronouns with the unexpected sloppy readings as E-type pronouns. Under the proposed analysis, the distribution of such pronouns is correctly predicted. It will also be shown that the analysis is successfully extended to sloppy identity in association-with-focus cases