Information and Discourse Structures and Topics: A Study of Japanese Cooking Show Discourse

Abstract

This paper discusses the usage of the topic-comment articulation of a sentence in Japanese cooking show discourse and argues that the description of the usage requires both information- and discourse-structural considerations. The analysis addresses two functions of topics: presenting cooking instructions as parallel procedures and connecting non-task-oriented utterances to the mainstream instructions. While the latter is observed in both TV and YouTube cooking show discourse, the YouTube discourse rarely uses the former and presents instructions more linearly, contrary to observations in other sub-registers of cooking discourse (Aoyama 1987; Moriya 1993; Shimojo 2019; Kaneyasu and Kuhara 2020). This study argues that the observed variations correlate with differences in discourse presentation rooted in different priorities: recipe clarity for the TV discourse and simplicity/brevity for YouTube. The discourse observations are also discussed in Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin 2005) for grammatical descriptions of the usage of topics.