Sounds interesting. In universal grammar, there are kind of these "switching points", where you choose (so to speak) between a few limited options for a certain kind of functionality. There are lots of final outcomes, but the actual number of those decisions isn't that high. A good introductory book is "The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules Of Grammar" by Mark Baker.This sounds like a theory that characterizes some of the more subtle aspects of Japanese under this scheme. Topic marking is a bit hard to grasp in Japanese, and it's quite different to English grammar. But according to this, it would have a functionality in the framework of universal grammar that replicated functions in English. Maybe it will make the theory of Japanese grammar a bit more rigorous and systematic, looking at it in terms of universal-grammar functionality instead of trying to sum it up in hard-and-fast mechanical rules, which is pretty difficult.(E.g. wa � which is the main topic marker, also has a function called "contrastive wa". I remember bringing this up in Japanese class, and the native Japanese teacher didn't know what I was talking about. It's a pretty vague distinction that's purely about context.)