Results from analyses of L1 and L2 Japanese written narratives are presented to discuss the relationships of backward-looking salience of referents and two morphosyntactic realizations of arguments: zero coding (i.e. discourse-driven zero anaphora) and topicalization with the topic marker wa. These forms are both known to be associated with givenness of information. The discussion of these forms is twofold. This chapter presents the analysis of discourse and chapter 4 presents the applications of RRG. For the discourse analysis, Centering Theory is utilized as the guiding framework, which will be extended with additional measures to define varying levels of salience. The usage of the two forms and their complementary and overlapping relationships are described in terms of the salience hierarchies proposed in this chapter, which also capture the L1–L2 differences in the usage of the argument forms and the more restricted usage of zero arguments in the L2 narratives.

The introductory chapter presents an overview of the book with key notions and theoretical approaches employed in the study. The noteworthy feature of the study is the integration of discourse analysis and grammatical analysis to describe how discourse and syntax influence each other and further develop the RRG theory of the syntax–semantics–discourse interface, and the inclusion of L2 discourse analysis, as well as L1 discourse, to demonstrate the relevance of L2 analysis to issues outside traditional second-language research.

This chapter further explores the bidimensional model of salience by probing forward-looking (imposed) salience. The forward-looking dimension involves two types of speakers’ guidance of hearer’s attention: active foregrounding of information, which is the case with collaborative repetitions discussed in chapter 5, and active backgrounding of information (forward-looking non-salience), which has drawn little attention in previous literature. It is important to distinguish imposed non-salience from imposed salience in the forward-looking dimension because, just as the speaker can intend certain entities to be more important than others, the speaker can also intend certain entities to be less important toward the development of the subsequent discourse. This active backgrounding must also be kept separate from natural decay in activation, which occurs when there is no continued reference to the information in the subsequent discourse. The discussion is based on the analysis of zero (post-nominal) marking of arguments and post-predicate placement of arguments in L1 Japanese conversation data.

This chapter builds on the discussion of rule systems in the previous chapter and addresses a major issue in modern morphological theory: the opposition of morpheme-based and paradigm-based approaches to morphological systems. Historically, these two opposing approaches can be traced to two distinct origins: morpheme-based approaches developed in the West following contact with the morpheme-based Pāṇinian approach to grammar, and paradigm-based approaches reflecting the inheritance from traditional Hellenistic and Roman grammar. Stump’s four-way decomposition of approaches to morphological theory is explored, and Pāṇini’s position within this framework is reassessed.

This chapter addresses the major syntactic (and partly semantic) topic of argument structure. Argument structure alternations have been central in the development of syntactic theory since Chomsky’s original transformational approach to passivization, and particularly since Fillmore’s work on ‘Case’ relations. In Pāṇinian grammar, the kāraka system provides a highly sophisticated model of argument structure, which has influenced developments in the modern Western tradition, and which also differs from modern argument structure approaches in interesting ways. The kāraka system is explained and illustrated, and compared and contrasted with modern approaches to argument alternations.

This chapter provides a detailed explanation and illustration of how Pāṇini's grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, works. It begins by providing an overview of the structure and contents of the grammar, including the various dependent texts such as the Śivasūtras. It then works through the full derivation of a simple Sanskrit sentence, explaining all the rules and processes required to derive the output prounciation given a meaning as input.

In this chapter the focus moves beyond Pāṇini’s grammar to address a topic of major concern within the broader Indian tradition: semantics. While some observations regarding semantics can be drawn from Pāṇini, for the most part semantics was treated as a separate field of inquiry within the Indian tradition until the early modern period. This chapter provides introductions to the traditions of semantic analysis in ancient India and the modern West, and a comparison of their approaches to one issue of central concern in semantic theory: compositionality.

Chapter 8 moves to the third strand of the Indian linguistic tradition (alongside ‘grammar’ and semantics): phonetic and phonological analysis. This strand of the Indian tradition has particular relevance to the modern Western concept of the ‘phoneme’, which has played a central yet controversial role in phonological analysis over the last century. Several criticisms of the phoneme concept have attributed its popularity in modern linguistics to the centrality of alphabetic writing in Western society, and some have pointed to India as a contrasting situation, where writing was never alphabetic. I show that in contrast to what is often assumed, the ancient Indian tradition of phonetic and phonological analysis depended on a concept essentially equivalent to the modern concept of a phoneme, despite not being influenced by an alphabetic (or indeed, originally by any) writing system.