The background and key concepts are presented, including the notion of salience of information and an overview of RRG as a parallel architecture theory, in particular the RRG representations of discourse-pragmatics as a separate and independent component. The important feature of RRG is the bidirectional interactions between the separate components of grammar, semantics, syntax, and discourse, and these interactions are discussed with examples. The study applies the notion of salience to the RRG theory of the syntax–semantics–discourse interface, and, for this, utilizes the bidimensional model of salience, consisting of both backward-looking and forward-looking salience. This bidimensional characterization is important because it captures both the hearer-based and the speaker-based discourse models. Furthermore, the study introduces the notion of forward-looking non-salience, the speaker’s active backgrounding of information, which is essential to the account of zero-marking and postposing of arguments in Japanese.

While summarizing the main points, the concluding chapter revisits the bidimensional model of salience based on the study of Japanese discourse and its implications for RRG, which is followed by remarks on the findings in the study of L2 Japanese discourse. Overall, zero and topic coding of arguments and zero coding of predicates mostly pertain to backward-looking salience, while predicate-less repetitions in L1 discourse relate to the forward-looking dimension of salience. On the other hand, zero marking and post-predicate coding of arguments pertain to forward-looking salience, specifically to imposing non-salience. With these, the study provides abundant evidence for the RRG claim that discourse-pragmatics plays a role in virtually every part of grammatical systems. Furthermore, the analysis of both backward-looking and forward-looking salience demonstrates the bidirectional discourse–syntax interfaces, an important property of the parallel architecture theory, because the backward-looking and forward-looking dimensions are relevant to the discourse-to-syntax and syntax-to-discourse linking respectively.

This chapter extends the analysis of zero coding to predicates, another basic element of language, i.e. predication. There are two major sections. The first analysis deals with a numeral classifier construction which contains a copula in the nucleus of a sentence instead of an intended verb. For this construction, usage in online texts is discussed and applied to RRG. This is followed by the analysis of zero predicates observed in spoken Japanese. This analysis is based on the Japanese-language interviews for proficiency testing and the findings are applied to RRG. The interview data consist of interactions of L1 and L2 speakers, and observations specific to L2 utterances are also addressed. Chapter 4 showed that the proper treatment of zero-coded arguments requires the representation of discourse salience at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and this chapter demonstrates that the same requirement applies to the zero-coding of predicates, which is relevant to the salience of propositions.

With the observations of the usage of zero and topicalized arguments discussed in chapter 3, this chapter applies the findings to RRG and shows how the observed regularities are captured in the theory. This chapter pays special attention to interfaces with discourse-pragmatics in the theory, particularly bidirectional interactions between syntax and pragmatics. The discussion begins with the focus structure of sentences, which is then integrated with the salience hierarchies proposed in chapter 3. This is followed by the discussion of linking between semantic and syntactic representations, which also involves discourse representation structures. The bidirectional interactions with discourse representation structures capture not only the discourse influence on syntax but also the other direction of the interface, i.e. how the speakers’ forward-looking intentions, manifested by the morphosyntactic realization of information, influence discourse representation structures.

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 deals with the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) approach to extraction restrictions, or island constraints. The cross-linguistic and language-internal (i.e. cross-constructional) variation in extraction restrictions is captured in RRG in terms of how deeply into sentence structure assertion may be represented. Some languages allow the potential focus domain to reach individual constituents in both complement and adverbial subordinate clauses, with consequences on the extractability of such constituents. One such case is Japanese, a more permissive language than English, which provides the main case study discussed in the chapter.