Reference Entailment and Maintenance Mechanisms in Universal Grammar of Japanese

This essay tries to 1) outline a pragmatically anchored, universal matrix of morpho-syntax and semantics, 2) provide a general account of one of its components, i.e., reference entailment and maintenance mechanisms, and 3) focus on some of these mechanisms, such as "topic-markers" and "topicalizers" (defined below), by analyzing the structural and functional characteristics of several particles in Japanese, in terms of the interactions between markedness hierarchy, the semantic contents of NPs (explained below), case relations, interclausal linkages and reference-maintenance relations. Also the paper investigates relationships between forms in the linguistic structure of Japanese and the emotive and conative effects of their uses in discourse.