Hinds (ibid.:87) presented his examination of WA and GA in relation to the taxonomy of AF values as follows:
1 Abe's fictional novel "Te" was used. The details are given in Appendix II.
ASSUMED FAMILIARITY
Brand-new Unused Noncontaining Containing /\ Inferrable Inferrable / \ [GA/WA] [GA/WA] [WA] Unanchored Anchored
Textually Situationally Evoked Evoked
[WA] [WA]
[GA] [GA/WA]
Fig. 7. Assumed familiarity value and GA/WA occurrence as analysed by H i n d s .
He states:
"If we reexamine the distribution of the postpositional particles wa and ga from the standpoint of this taxonomy, we discover that those items termed "Inferrable" and
"Evoked" are typically marked by wa. This much is well known to the linguistic public, and is simply a refine ment of the term "given".
In Prince's category "New", however, we find, contrary to expectation, that ga does not mark each of these noun phrases. We find that noun phrases which indicate "Unused"
information are marked by wa. Further, we find that "Brand- new Anchored" information may be marked by either wa or ga. It is only the category "Brand-new Unanchored" which
obligatorily requires ga marking." (p.87)2
It is unclear how Hinds reached the above conclusion. It is not stated in the study whether or not Hinds actually looked at any particular discourse to obtain the result, although an implication is there that he did investigate discourse of one sort or another.
Although Hinds' analysis seems to be claimed as almost being categorical to the extent that he purports that taxonomy can explain
2 There is a discrepancy between the figure presented by Hinds as Fig. 7 and what he states in the quote. He lists both GA/WA in his diagramme for New Unused but says as if it is marked only by WA. He should have been more careful and said that some noun phrases which indicate
the distribution of GA and WA in Japanese discourse, going through any discourse, one can find with no difficulty occurrences of GA and WA markings that do not fit into the analysis above. In particular, this applies to the occurrences of GA markings for entities that may be categorised as Containing Inferrable, Textually Evoked and Situation- ally Evoked, to which Hinds claimed WA is typically assigned. This is illustrated by the following example:
(1) Kantaroo ga ochita tokini, ore no awase no katasode GA fell when I GEN kimono GEN one sleeve mogete, kyuuni te ga jiyuuni natta.3
tore off suddenly arm NOM free became
'When Kantaroo fell (down to the ground), one of the sleeves of my kimono tore off and my arm suddenly became free.' Here 'one of the sleeves' has the value of Containing Inferrable since
it is inferrable from 'my kimono' which is properly contained in the NP. The NP however, is marked by GA despite Hinds' claim.
There is also an example from my own study of Abe's book.
(2) Aru hi, sono ”te"_____no koe G A . han—heiwashugisha no mimi . one day that "Hands" GEN voice anti pacifists POS ears ni tomatta no datta. (p.42)
to reached COM COP
'One day the voice of "Hands" reached the anti-pacifists.' The story where the above sentence occurs is related through the eyes of a dove, the central figure of the story; thus in the story the first person pronoun always refers to the dove. "Te"("Hands"), being treated as a proper noun in quotation ma r k s , indicates the pair of hands which looks after the dove and consequently refers to the caretaker himself. In the immediately preceding sentences it is told that "Hands" has been going around telling people what had happened to his dove which is now dead and has become a metallic statue placed in the middle of the town
3 The example is taken from S. Natsume, p.6. The details of the book are found in the Sources of Primary Data.
square as a symbol of peace. In this context sono "te" no k o e 'the voice of "Hands"' is textually evoked, but again is marked by GA contrary to what Hinds' analysis predicts.
Examples of Situationally Evoked discourse entities would be difficult to find in written discourse such as a novel but it is not hard to imagine the following conversation taking place in a real
situation.
(3) Two females chatting at a party:
A: Asoko ni tatteiru hito GA ima kotchi o mite
there at standing person now here ACC see and waratta w a y o .
smiled SFP
'That person standing over there looked at us (over here) and smiled.'
B: Hontoo? Kao ni mioboe wa nai k e d o ... really face at memory TOP not exist but 'Really? I don't recognise the face though...'
Obviously asoko ni tatteiru hito in such a context is situationally evoked but it is most naturally marked with GA.