A pragmatic account of scrambling and topicalization in Japanese

- The Givónian approach is applied to Japanese on the basis of the corpus.
- Scrambled objects tend to be anaphorically prominent.
- Scrambled objects are likely to be cataphorically non-prominent.
- Topicalization predicts continuing the same topic realized as the object.
- Word order changes are applied for the intermediately accessible referents.

The purpose of this study is to explore the interactions between word orders and particles in Japanese transitive sentences in terms of information structure. To this end, a series of corpus analyses within the framework of the Givónian approach were conducted. Based on the present corpus analyses, I propose that scrambling is chosen when the scrambled object is anaphorically prominent but cataphorically non-prominent, and that topicalization is selected when the direct object is anaphorically and cataphorically prominent. Additionally, I arrive at the conclusion that word order permutations in Japanese are applied to intermediately accessible referents. In other words, word order changes are neither used with highly accessible referents, nor completely new information.