Focus Clitics and Discourse Information Spreading

In some languages, morphology plays a crucial role to represent a sentence discourse structure. In this paper, Japanese focus clitics and their distribution are examined. Against recent works on information structure, an independent discourse structure is postulated as a part of the grammar of LFG. Andrews and Manning's (1999) information spreading is adopted here, so that flexible sharing of various types of information among phrase structure nodes is allowed. Moreover, Stump's (2001) Paradigm Function Morphology functions as a parallel correspondence between phrase structure, functional structure and discourse structure. Finally, some implications to the puzzling behaviours of the similar focus clitics in Hindi are skeched.