Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/77571

Two types of perspective for analysing Japanese sentences are proposed: the insect’s eye view and the bird’s eye view. The insect’s eye view produces neutral descriptive sentences: 1) Sora-ga aoi. 2) Tonneru-wo nukeru-to, yukiguni datta. The bird’s eye view produces sentences with explanatory or universal implications: 3) Sora-wa aoi. 4) Tsuki-wa michitari kaketari shimasu. In previous studies I proposed the deictic and contexual points of view for analyzing Japanese sentences. The former corresponds to the insect’s eye view and the latter to the bird’s eye view. Japanese sentences with topic noun phrases followed by the particle WA are contexual because these topic phrases must refer to the foregoing discourse or the situation around the utterance. In contrastive contexts a phrase with the particle WA co-refers to another contrasting phrase: 5) Biiru-wa nomanai Yuri mo wain-nara nomu. In this article a third type of WA sentence is discussed: 6) Soko-ni boku-wa ita. In this sentence the noun “boku” is neither topical nor contrastive. This sentence also describes the situation from the bird’s eye view. I propose that this type of sentence takes its utterance frame as its point of reference.