Postposing Constructions in Japanese : Strategies for Presenting Information

In spoken Japanese, sentence elements are often placed in postverbal position against the canonical SOV word order of Japanese. Previous studies cited here have investigated the postposing constructiens in terms of the informational status of postposed elements, the speaker\u27s cognitive status and so on. Unfortunately, however, there is a type of postposing construction which has fallen outside the scope of investigation of those studies. The present study argues that the postposing constructien can justifiably be classified into three subtypes. According to this analysis, the first two subtypes are uttered under the restriction of time and without an elaborate consideration of how to organize the text, the postposed element being added as an afterthought. In contrast, the third subtype exemplifies the picture of utterance in which the speaker purposefully reverses the word order to draw the hearer\u27s attention to the postposed element, which no longer serves as an afterthought. It is also shown in this paper that some properties peculiar to this construction can be accounted for within the framework of Relevance Theory