Salience of Information in Japanese: Discourse and the Syntax–Pragmatics Interface

'Salience' is a linguistic phenomenon whereby information that is 'given', or 'new', is distributed and presented within a sentence in particular ways that convey its relevance. Although it has been widely described as the speaker's linguistic choices based on the hearer's perspective, it has received less attention as the speaker's manipulations of the hearer's cognitive states. This timely study redresses that balance by analysing several morphosyntactic phenomena in Japanese, drawing on a wide range of authentic language examples. Taking a functionalist perspective, it brings together studies of grammar and discourse, which are often described separately, and deploys the combined grammar-discourse approach in Role and Reference Grammar, the structural-functionalist theory in which syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are equally central to our understanding of language. It also offers an analysis of second language (L2) learners' Japanese discourse, and demonstrates the relevance of that analysis to issues outside of traditional second language research.

Mitsuaki Shimojo is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His notable publications include Argument Encoding in Japanese Conversation (2005).