Japanese Wa in conversational discourse: A Contrast Marker

This study provides evidence to support the claim that a primary function of the postpositional particle wa in Japanese conversational discourse is to mark a contrast. Wa has been widely studied in research on sentence grammar, which has suggested two separate functions of the particle, thematic and contrastive (Kuno 1973a; 1973b; Shibatani 1990). However, no study seems to have been done on conversation. In my study, analysis of 80 tokens of np-wa in conversation has revealed that wa marks a contrast. Furthermore, this study claims that it is the prior discourse that serves to establish the contrastive function of wa.