Kuno claims that the nature of themes is such that they must either be anaphoric or generic. Anaphoricity is defined as "objects and concepts that have been mentioned and recorded in the registry of the present discourse" [Kuno (1973a:39), underlining is my own]. Further more, nouns of unique reference, such as the sun, the moon and my wife, are considered to be anaphoric and remain in the permanent registry for each given discourse together with generic noun phrases. The charac teristic of theme as being either an anaphoric or a generic noun phrase is common to both Japanese and English. Thus 'the man that she met' in
(28) has presumably been referred to previously so that listeners know who the speaker is talking about and this is why, Kuno says, that (28) but not (29) is acceptable.
(28) Speaking of the man she met, he was a hardworking accountant. (29) ^Speaking of a man that we met, he was a hardworking
Also observe the following Japanese sentences:2 (30) *0ozei no hito WA paatii ni kimashita.
many GEN people TOP party to came
'Speaking of many people, they came to the party.' (31) ^Tsumaranai hito WA paatii ni kimashita.
boring people TOP party to came
'Speaking of boring people, they came to the party.' (32) *Dareka WA byooki desu.
somebody TOP sick COP
'Speaking of somebody, he is sick.'
Kuno imputes the unacceptability of the above sentences to the fact that the noun phrases oozei no hito'many people', tsumaranai hito'bor— ing people' and dareka' somebody' do not have referents that are registered in the discourse at the time of utterance and therefore cannot be anaphoric.
The restriction that a theme must be either an anaphoric or a generic noun phrase however, does not seem to apply to contrastive NP WA. This observation of Kuno's is based on sentences like the follow
ing:
A: Kinoo no paatii WA doo deshita ka ? yesterday GEN party TOP how COP Q Omoshiroi hito ni iroiro aimashita ka ?
interesting people DAT various met Q 'How was yesterday's party? Did you meet various
interesting people?'
(33) B: *Iie, tsumaranai hito WA takusan imashita. no boring people TOP a lot existed 'No, there were a lot of boring people.'
(34) B: lie, tsumaranai hito WA takusan imashita ga omoshiroi but interesting hito WA amari imasendeshita.
people TOP much did not exist
'No, there were a lot of boring people but not many interesting people.'
2 Example sentences (28) - (32) are borrowed from Kuno (1973a:39 and 45).
According to Kuno tsumarani h i t o 'boring people' in (33) is neither generic nor anaphoric and as such cannot be the theme of the sentence; this is why (33) results as an unacceptable sentence. On the other hand in (34) tsumaranai hito is contrasted with omoshiroi h i t o * interesting people' , the result of which is a perfectly good Japanese sentence.
3.3.3 Problems with semantic analyses of NP GA and NP WA
As briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, the first problem relating to semantic analysis is that anaphoricity or genericness does not always explain what a topic NP WA is in Japanese. It is true that for most of the time, NP WA is found to be of either an anaphoric or generic nature, but there are cases of NP WA which cannot be considered neither anaphoric nor generic. See the examples below;
(35) Nihon no sarariiman no ooku WA ichoobyoo o Japan GEN salaried man GEN many TOP stomach disorders ACC motteiru.
have
'Many Japanese company employees have stomach disorders.' (36) Kurasu de joodan ga wakaru omoshiroi hito WA
class in joke NOM understand interesting people TOP minna paatii ni kita.
all party to came
'The interesting ones in class who understand jokes all came to the p a r t y. '
(37) Kono naka no dareka WA Hokkaidoo shusshin da. this inside GEN someone TOP coming from COP 'Someone here (amongst us) comes from Hokkaidoo.'
These sentences are acceptable, even though the WA marked subjects are not generic, and even when the subjects are not anaphoric, such as when
these sentences are used as the opening sentence of a conversation. Another issue is the thematicity and contrastiveness of NP WA. Some linguists such as Inoue (1983b) and Kitahara (1981) have claimed that notions of thematicity and contrastiveness may be collapsed into one
and that the fundamental characterisation of topic NP WA is at tributable to the notion of contrastiveness. It is necessary to further examine thematic NP WA and contrastive NP WA from this point of view. Regarding NP GA there are questions naturally arising from the analysis of the interpretations NP GA renders and the predicate type with which the NP GA occurs. NP GA cannot be claimed to be fully understood unless one knows why it yields only an EL reading with certain predicates but both interpretations with other predicates. Also what would be the common underlying semantics of each group of predicates, if any, or is the bifurcation of predicate type based on some arbitrary criteria?
These unresolved problems and questions indicate that the semantic analysis of NP GA and NP WA is yet to be completed.