3 - Backward-Looking Salience and Argument Forms

Summary

Results from analyses of L1 and L2 Japanese written narratives are presented to discuss the relationships of backward-looking salience of referents and two morphosyntactic realizations of arguments: zero coding (i.e. discourse-driven zero anaphora) and topicalization with the topic marker wa. These forms are both known to be associated with givenness of information. The discussion of these forms is twofold. This chapter presents the analysis of discourse and chapter 4 presents the applications of RRG. For the discourse analysis, Centering Theory is utilized as the guiding framework, which will be extended with additional measures to define varying levels of salience. The usage of the two forms and their complementary and overlapping relationships are described in terms of the salience hierarchies proposed in this chapter, which also capture the L1–L2 differences in the usage of the argument forms and the more restricted usage of zero arguments in the L2 narratives.