Topics and focuses

7.2. Topics and focuses

The topic and the fucus are concepts commonly found in human languages. Topics are old information, which you have already talked about in a conversation. Focuses are new information, which are often the key of an answer to a question.

Let's think about topics and focuses in English. Compare the following two conversations:

1.	A: What did you see yesterday? B: Yesterday I saw Titanic.
2.	A: When did you see the movie? B: I saw the movie yesterday.

The underlined letters indicate topics, which are information backgrounds of the conversation. The italic letters indicate focuses, which are either important new information or requests for it. You can sometimes say only a focus, so you can just say "Titanic." at 1-B, and "Yesterday." at 2-B.

The examples below show selecting topics.

3.	A: I saw a movie a week ago, and I saw another movie yesterday. B: What did you see yesterday?
4.	A: I saw a movie and went shopping yesterday. B: What did you see?

Underlined letters indicate topics. At 3-B, the speaker chooses yesterday in 3-A, not a week ago, as the information background of the conversation. At 4-B, the speaker chooses saw a movie in 4-A, not went shopping.

Focuses always have stronger accents, and topics sometimes have. They affect the word order. In English, a topic should appear before a focus in plain sentences if possible. So it is not good to say "Yesterday I saw the movie." at 2-B.

English has the following ways to display topics and focuses clearly:

Cleft sentence:	It is Mary that he really likes.	(Mary is a focus)
Pseudo-cleft sentence:	Who he really likes is Mary.	(Mary is a focus)
Left dislocation:	Mary, he really likes her.	(Mary is a topic)
Topicalization:	Mary he really likes.	(Mary is a topic)

Now let's go on to Japanese. In Japanese, there is a postposition to mark topics. It is the postposition

/wa/. Please be sure that it is the exceptional word which has the hiragana

/ha/ but has the same phonemes as

/wa/.

The subject of a sentence is accompanied by the topic marker

/wa/ unless it is a focus. A phrase which is not the subject is accompanied by the topic marker when it is a topic and is more important than the subject. So the subject normally has the topic marker.

The topic marker is added after other postpositions. You have already learned two postpositions; one is the nominative marker

/ga/, and the other is the accusative marker

/o/. The topic marker overrides and remove these two postpositions. No other postpositions will be overridden.

This is a table of how the topic marker overrides the two postpositions. The postposition for the dative, locative, and ablative markers are used here just for examples. They will be explained in later chapters.

	Nominative marker	Accusative marker	Dative marker	Locative marker	Ablative marker
Non-topic	/ga/	/o/	/ni'/	/de'/	/kara'/
Topic	/wa/	/wa/	/ni'wa/	/de'wa/	/kara'wa/

Look at the examples of the topic marker below:

Hiragana:
Phonemes:	sa	ku	ra	ga	(space)	sa	i	ta
Structure:	noun (cherry blossoms)			nominative marker		verb (bloomed)

The subject

/sakura/ is not accompanied by the topic marker

/wa/, so it must be a focus. There are two possibilities: cherry blossoms is new information, or the whole sentence is new information. The preceding question might be "What bloomed?" for the former possibility, and "What happened?" for the latter. It doesn't matter whether such a question is actually asked. You can introduce new information to conversation yourself.

Let's add the topic marker after the nominative marker. The nominative marker is overridden like this:

Hiragana:
Phonemes:	sa	ku	ra	wa	(space)	sa	i	ta
Structure:	noun (cherry blossoms)			topic marker		verb (bloomed)

In this case, the subject

/sakura/ must have been already talked about. The preceding question might be "Did the cherry blossoms bloom?" or "How are the cherry blossoms?". In the latter case, the verb

/saita/ is a focus.

Let's look at topics of sentences which have an object. This is also a sentence used in the previous page:

Hiragana:
Phonemes:	ga	ka	ga	(space)	e'	o	(space)	ka'	i	ta
Structure:	noun (artist)		nominative marker		noun (picture)	accusative marker		verb (drew)

Neither the subject nor the object is a topic, so they can be focuses. The preceding question might be "Who drew a picture?", "Who drew what?", or "What happened?".

Hiragana:
Phonemes:	ga	ka	wa	(space)	e'	o	(space)	ka'	i	ta
Structure:	noun (artist)		topic marker		noun (picture)	accusative marker		verb (drew)

The subject is a topic, so the preceding question might be "What did the artist draw?" or "What did the artist do?".

Hiragana:
Phonemes:	e'	wa	(space)	ga	ka	ga	(space)	ka'	i	ta
Structure:	noun (picture)	topic marker		noun (artist)		nominative marker		verb (drew)

The topic marker overrides the accusative marker in this sentence. The preceding question might be "Who drew the picture?".

As you see, a topic should appear before a focus in Japanese as well as in English. Since you can freely change the word order of a Japanese sentence, you can easily move the topic to the beginning of the sentence. If there are more than one information background, the subject, which is possibly a topic, is likely to appear first. If there are more than one piece of new information, the strongest focus is likely to appear immediately before the verb.

In English, you cannot omit the subject, the verb, or the object of a sentence even when they are topics. In Japanese, only the verb is necessary to make the sentence grammatically correct. You don't have to say the subject or the object when they are clear from context. As a reply to the question "What did the artist do?", you can just say this:

Hiragana:
Phonemes:	e'	o	(space)	ka'	i	ta
Structure:	noun (picture)	accusative marker		verb (drew)

The hidden subject is clearly the artist, or

/gaka/.

If you don't want to say a whole sentence, you can say only the focus word as well as in English. To answer the question "What did the artist draw?", you can just say

/e/ or

/e'o/;

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