Licensing Japanese Gapless Topic Sentences

The aim of this paper is to give an answer to the question as to why Japanese has gapless topic sentences while English does not.It has been well known since Kuno 1973 that Japanese, but not English, has gapless topic sentences and descriptive generalizations have emerged.However, few studies, if any, have attempted to explain why some other languages like English do not have this type of topic sentences.In this paper, I propose that Japanese has gapless topic sentences because of the lack of determiners and complementizers in its lexicon while English does not have gapless topic sentences because of the presence of determiners and complementizers in its lexicon.