Topicality, genericity, and logophoricity: The postpositional markers nun in Korean and wa in Japanese from an argument perspective

This dissertation presents an account of the postpositional markers nun in Korean and wa in Japanese from an argument perspective. The overall theme is the nature of the structures of the topic-comment sentences, generic sentences, predicate denial sentences, contrastive sentences, and logophoric sentences in which both markers appear in these languages.;Based on the cognitive property of being categorical and the logical property of being representable by tripartite structures that underlie the topic-comment sentences, generic sentences, and predicate denial sentences, I claim that wa/nun is essentially a marker for presupposition in the sense that it refers anaphorically to the previous information. I propose that this complex meaning of the marker, anaphoric presupposition, must be represented by an argument structure of a relational noun with two grids, y x, as opposed to the case markers which have only one argument. Thus, the NP marked with wa/nun is referentially defective in the sense that it cannot occur without some type of antecedent, explicit or implicit. The argument structure hypothesis of the postpositional marker is further supported by the elucidation of the inherent relation between anaphoricity and logophoricity, the relation between anaphoricity and contrastiveness, and the interaction of the marker with negative scalar sentences.;The important tools and assumptions in explicating the underlying structures of the above sentences are the notion of TRIPARTITE STRUCTURES (cf. Heim 1982), the cognitive distinction between CATEGORICAL JUDGMENT and THETIC JUDGMENT (cf. Kuroda 1992), Aristotle's PREDICATE TERM vs. PREDICATE DENIAL negations, and Horn (1989)'s theory of metalinguistic negation which is based on the distinction between the ASSERTIBILITY of a statement vs. the TRUTH of a proposition.;Chapter 1 is the Introduction. Chapter 2 critically reviews the two syntactic approaches on the marker nun and wa: Whitman (1989)'s Modal Licensing Hypothesis and Brockett (1991)'s Generic Raising Hypothesis. Chapter 3 is devoted to the examination of the four types of sentence structures in which these markers occur: that is, generic sentences, topic-comment sentences, contrastive sentences, and logophoric sentences. Chapter 4 investigates the interaction of nun/wa with negation in declaratives, quantifiers, and scalar predicates. Chapter 5 will conclude with a summary of the thesis and a discussion of theoretical implications.