The Syntax of Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation

The Syntax of Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation investigates familiar grammatical phenomena including Tense, Aspect, and Negation in a theoretically under-studied language, Vietnamese.

Trang Phan is currently a lecturer of Vietnamese language and linguistics at VNU University of Languages & International Studies, Vietnamese National University Hanoi. Phan obtained her PhD from University of Sheffield (England) in 2013 on the structure and acquisition of Vietnamese verbal aspect. From 2014 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher of the Cartographic Syntax project at Ghent University (Belgium), working on various aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure in a crosslinguistic perspective, including the position of Vietnamese with respect to the NP/DP parameter, the prodrop parameter, and the topic-prominent/subject-prominent parameter. From 2019 to 2021, Phan was the principal investigator of the project on the Nanosyntax of Vietnamese tense and aspect funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED). From 2020 to 2021, Phan was a visiting scholar at Harvard Yenching Institute (Cambridge, USA), working on how Vietnamese classifiers, plurals, and articles update our current understanding of classifier languages. In addition to having papers published at well-established linguistic journals and publishers, Trang Phan is the co-editor of the volume Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics (2019) and the JSEALS special issue Vietnamese Linguistics: State of the Field (2022).

PREFACE ABBREVIATIONS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Objectives 2. Why Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation? 3. Research questions 4. Theoretical assumptions 5. Outline of the book CHAPTER 2: SYNTACTICISING TENSEDNESS 1. Introduction 2. Theoretical background 3. Non-peripherality 4. Non-optionality 5. The hierarchy of tense and aspect 6. Other properties associated with tensedness 6.1. Bare predicates 6.2. Finiteness 6.3. Expletive subjects 7. Conclusion CHAPTER 3: DECOMPOSING THE PERFECT 1. Introduction 2. Theoretical background 3. The semantic compositionality of -ã 3.1. Achievements and -ã 3.2. States and -ã 3.3. Activities and -ã 3.4. Accomplishments and -ã 3.5. Discussion 4. The interaction between -ã and negative/interrogative markers không/chýa 4.1. -ã in the absence of negative không/ch-a 4.2. -ã in the presence of negative không/ch-a 4.3. -ã in the presence of interrogative không/ch-a 4.4. Discussion 5. The Interaction between -ã and other preverbal elements 6. Conclusion CHAPTER 4: CALCULATING TELICITY 1. On the compositionality of telicity in Vietnamese 1.1. Inherently telic verbs 1.2. Telic particles 1.3. Numeral direct object 1.4. Other factors 2. The syntactic projection of telicity in Vietnamese 3. Immediate consequence: Thematic hierarchy in causatives 4. Extension 5. Conclusion CHAPTER 5: DECOMPOSING THE NEGATORS 1. Introduction 2. Negation and Lexical Aspect 3. Negation and Grammatical Aspect: the differences between không and ch-a 4. Negation and Interrogativity 4.1. A cross-linguistic perspective 4.2. The similarities between negative không/ch-a and interrogative không/ch-a 4.3. Differences between negative không/ch-a and interrogative không/ch-a 4.4. A proposal for the featural make-up of không and ch-a 5. Conclusion CHAPTER 6: EXPLAINING THE NEGATION CONSTRAINT ON ASPECT 1. Introduction 2. Previous accounts 3. Explaining the negation constraint: The Nanosyntactic approach 4. Conclusion CHAPTER 7: FINAL REMARKS 1. Does Vietnamese have Tense? 2. What is the functional sequence of Aspect markers in Vietnamese? 3. How does Negation interact with Tense Aspect in Vietnamese? 4. What does this study of Vietnamese TAN contribute to a better understanding of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages as well as of language more universally?