🚀 go-pugleaf

                         UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
                      STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

                  GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE

                                PRESENTS

                              S.-Y. KURODA

                       Department of Linguistics
                  University of California, San Diego

        The Cognitive Basis of the So-Called Topic in Japanese:
            A Contribution to Discourse and Narrative Theory

The Japanese language distinguishes  ``topicalized''  and  ``nontopical-
ized''  sentences  by  grammatical  means.  This distinction is commonly
accounted for  in  terms  of  discourse  theory.   I  once  proposed  an
approach,  broadly put, in cognitive semantics, in terms of the distinc-
tion between ``categorical'' and ``thetic'' judgments,  the  distinction
originally  introduced  by Franz Brentano and Anton Marty.  I would like
to give a  fresh  look  at  this  distinction;  I  propose  to  separate
``affirming''  from  ``asserting''.   I  will  apply this distinction to
account for different effects that topicalized and  nontopicalized  sen-
tences bring to discourse and narration.

                        Thursday, March 23, 1989
                               4:00 P.M.
                     280 Park Hall, Amherst Campus

           There will be an evening discussion at 8:00 P.M.,
           at Mary Galbraith's, 130 Jewett Parkway, Buffalo.

For further information, contact Bill Rapaport, Department  of  Computer
Science, 716-636-3193.