A contrastive analysis of Informational Structure in Spanish and Japanese : similarities, differences and frictions

Japanese is a language that uses primarily formal means, like the use of the particle wa (は), to mark a segment as the topic or the focus. Spanish is a language that uses primarily grammatical means, like word order, to mark a segment as the topic or the focus. Despite this difference, in both languages the topic and/or the focus can be put at the beginning, at the middle or at the end. As a result, because the range of grammatically correct word orders allowed in both languages is very wide, parallel structures (same word order) exist in Spanish and Japanese. However, the informational structure of these parallel structures is not always equivalent because, primarily, the means used to make clear the informational structure (pronunciation, commas, pronouns) and what kind of element (subject, object, etc.) can be used as a topic or as a focus in any given position are not the same. In this paper, we will explain every position (initial, medial, final) and the kind of restrictions, peculiarities, similarities, differences and frictions entailed in both languages