2 - Background

Summary

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.