THE JAPANESE POSTPOSITIONS wa AND ga

Abstract

The topic is the general notional context of the sentence and is usually considered to be already in the consciousness of the listener either because of recent prior mention or because of the subject of the discourse. In addition, it is generally considered to suggest a comparison with other ideas in the same class. Matsuo Soga even posits in the underlying form of such sentences an optionally deleted sentence joined to the first by the coordinate conjunction ga 'but', making explicit in the deep structure the comparison which is implicit in the surface structure.