Publication ｜Sophia Linguistica
Tatsuhiro Matsuda
The aim of this paper is to give an answer to the question as to why Japanese has gapless
topic sentences while English does not. It has been well known since Kuno 1973 that
Japanese, but not English, has gapless topic sentences and descriptive generalizations
have emerged. However, few studies, if any, have attempted to explain why some
other languages like English do not have this type of topic sentences. In this paper, I
propose that Japanese has gapless topic sentences because of the lack of determiners
and complementizers in its lexicon while English does not have gapless topic sentences
because of the presence of determiners and complementizers in its lexicon.
