Japanese Wa-phrases That Aren't Topics*

The Japanese particle wa is widely considered a marker for topic. This paper presents new evidence that contrary to this general view, wa does not only mark topic, but it also marks items that are simply discourse anaphoric. The evidence comes from the observation that a wa-phrase displays distinct syntactic behaviour depending on whether it is interpreted as a topic or discourse anaphoric. It is furthermore argued that topics in Japanese, contrastive or not, must appear in clause-initial position, which, as will be demonstrated, has the desired consequence that a clause may contain no more than one topic.