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Auxiliary placement and interpretation in Vietnamese
... could find work' can be interpreted as either 'was able to' or 'managed to'. Elsewhere, I have suggested that for Vietnamese this ambiguity reflects a structural effect, that just in this position duac should be interpreted as an aspectual element, in association with the functional category AspP within VP; see Duffield 1998, in prep, a, cf. Travis 1991. ...
... In this section, I review two recent accounts of post-verbal duac, Duffield 1998 andSimpson 1997. Although both authors pursue the same general strategy, deriving sentence-final duac by preposing other material to some higher position as in (2) above, the two analyses diverge in important respects. ...
... I present my previous analysis first. In Duffield 1998,1 argued for the analysis of rightward duac as schematized in (17) below. This analysis involves the raising of a single sentential constituent into a higher topic position; essentially, I treat the raised constituent as an obligatory sentential subject of (epistemic) duac. ...
Cet article etudie la syntaxe et la semantique des constructions du vietnamien ou l’element auxiliaire apparait a droite du syntagme verbal. A premiere vue, cette distribution represente une objection aux propositions universalistes de Kayne 1995 et Cinque 1998, objection qui a deja fait l’objet de deux analyses (Duffield 1998 et Simpson 1997, 1998). Le present article reexamine les faits soutenant ces precedentes propositions. Il montre que ces faits sont insuffisants pour justifier la complexite derivationnelle de l’une ou de l’autre interpretation, et propose un traitement plus simple, qui prend en consideration l’interpretation des conditions grammaticales et extragrammaticales regissant le placement de l’auxiliaire en vietnamien, tout en conciliant ces distributions avec les principes universels.
... Consider, then, the paradigm for được (≈ CAN) in (38), from Duffield (1998Duffield ( , 1999 The examples in (38) demonstrate how Vietnamese word order quite clearly disambiguates different readings of modal được: where the modal appears preverbally, the only available reading is deontic whereas in immediately post-verbal position (before the object noun-phrase), the reading is aspectual (perfective) instead of modal. 7 A point worth mentioning in passing is that unlike post-verbal modals, which compete for a single functional slot, pre-verbal modals are iterable: where this happens, the higher modal (further to the left) is interpreted epistemically (epistemic [ deontic), as in (39): (39) a. Cô ấy nên được kiếm viėc. ...
... The main justification for this is that whereas all of the other modal auxiliaries participate in the pre-verbal/postverbal alternation-see examples (39)-(41) below-được is the only modal auxiliary to occur after the VP. For analyses of final được seeDuffield (1998Duffield ( , 1999; cf. alsoSimpson (1998Simpson ( , 2001, for discussion of a similar phenomenon in Thai. ...
By comparison with other areally- and typologically-related languages, the Vietnamese language disposes of a large and diverse set of (non-affixal) grammatical particles: these display interesting parallels with functional heads in familiar Western European languages. Most of these grammatical morphemes are ‘multifunctional’ in the sense that their meaning is largely—in some cases, exclusively—determined by their clausal distribution; alternatively, by their configurational relationship to other grammatical morphemes. In this paper, I document the distribution of these particles, working down the clausal spine. I also present a set of analyses of those cases where particles interact with one another, with each group considered in its own terms. Following this presentation, some broader implications of these analyses are briefly considered: it is suggested that a more satisfactory explanation of Vietnamese grammar can be found if it is assumed that grammatical meaning inheres in syntax, rather than in lexical representations.
... Lan cẳt (*ra) cỏ ra Lan cut T-PART grass T-PART 'Lan cut grass.' ¾ Duffield (1998, 1999 ...
In this talk, I will: • introduce three Vietnamese particles that induce a telic interpretation of an event, which show common syntactic characteristics. (telic particles) 1 • argue that telic particles are best analyzed as heading a functional projection above VP, or aspect phrase.
... This mention of Vietnamese is based on(Duffield 1998) and personal communication. However, Duffield's paper only considers the resultative kind of SVC, and these also allow an alternative word order in which the second verb precedes the shared object in Vietnamese. ...
: We argue that the Minimalist view of phrase structure in Chomsky 1995 should be minimally extended to allow for phrases that have more than one head, so long as the two heads have the same category features and are not attracted by a higher head. This innovation results in an elegant typology of the various kinds of syntactically distinguishable serial verb constructions (SVCs) found in Edo and related West African languages, as discovered by Stewart (1998). In particular, we claim that the different SVCs come from different choices of which phrase in the clausal structure is doubly headed: Voice, light v, or V. Moreover, details of Edo syntax allow us to make some refinements to the theory of clause structure; these include showing that Kratzer's Voice head is distinct from Chomsky's v head, and showing exactly where agents, themes and goal phrases are generated. Empirical evidence for our claims comes from a variety of syntactic and semantic sources, but especially from the positio...
This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo, whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers, representing a wide spectrum of frameworks, approaches and methods, from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects, to corpus-based discussions of language and gender, to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes, to laboratory experiments, and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data, as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured, acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics, and Southeast Asian languages more generally.
This paper compares the initial state of second language acquisition (L2A) and third language acquisition (L3A) from the generative linguistics perspective. We examine the acquisition of the Determiner Phrase (DP) by two groups of beginning French learners: an L2 group (native speakers of Vietnamese who do not speak any English) and an L3 group (native speakers of Cantonese who are also proficient L2 English users). Two current competing models in the field of theoretical second language acquisition, namely Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) and the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) are compared and their extension to L3A evaluated. Results point to full transfer of L1 in the L2 initial state and partial transfer of L2 in the L3 initial state. The L3 group performed significantly better than the L2 group on most of the properties tested. We suggest that these findings are not totally consistent with either FTFA or FFFH, but argue that they crucially demonstrate that L3A is not simply another case of L2A because transfer in L3A does not necessarily always come from L1.
In a group of genetically unrelated and otherwise fully regular head-initial SVO languages a particular modal verb is consistently found to occur in predicate-final position, posing a strong empirical challenge to the Universal Base Hypothesis argued for in Cinque (1999). Detailed investigation indicates that the surface forms are however derived from fully regular underlying structures via a process of focus-driven light predicate raising. Cross-linguistic variation in the paradigm then shows that the basic modal structure is currently in different stages of development in the languages investigated. In Cantonese in particular it is argued that the trigger for VP-raising has now become fully fossilized and no longer reflects its original motivation. The paper concludes that certain movement operations may in general occur without any clearly understandable synchronic trigger. Formally, Chomsky's 'strong categorial/EPP features' are suggested to correspond precisely to this type of movement whose original motivation has weakened and become hidden during the course of language change.
Since the earliest days of generative grammar, control has been distinguished from raising: the latter the product of movement operations, the former the result of construal processes relating a PRO to an antecedent. This article argues that obligatory control structures are also formed by movement. Minimalism makes this approach viable by removing D-Structure as a grammatical level. Implementing the suggestion, however, requires eliminating the last vestiges of D-Structure still extant in Chomsky's (1995) version of the Minimalist Program. In particular, it requires dispensing with the θ-Criterion and adopting the view that θ-roles are featurelike in being able to license movement.
Wh-words in Mandarin Chinse can have a non-interrogative indefinite interpretation as well as an interrogative one. The occurrence of a non-interrogative Wh-element is subject to certain semantic and syntactic constraints: it needs a c-commanding non-interrogative Wh licensor, the set of the licensors being defined in terms of the effect on the truth value of a proposition. The relation between the non-interrogative Wh and its licensor is a binder-variable relation, like the one that exists between an interrogative Wh and a question operator. Appropriate interpretations of given Wh-elements are determined by the property of the binder: if a Wh-element is bound by a question operator, it is an interrogative; if bound by a non-question operator, it is a non-interrogative. The binder-variable relation is subject to a Minimality requirement and displays Blocking and Specificity effects.
Auxiliary placement and interpretation in Vietnamese
- Nigel Duffield
Duffield, Nigel. 1998. Auxiliary placement and interpretation in Vietnamese. In M.
C. Gruber, D. Higgins, K. S. Olson and T. Wysocki (eds.) Proceedings of the
34th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
Multifunctionality and scope evasion in Vietnamese clause structure. ms
- Nigel Duffield
Duffield, Nigel. 2000. Multifunctionality and scope evasion in Vietnamese clause
structure. ms., MPI, Nijmegen.
VP-syntax in Vietnamese and other South East Asian Languages
- Nigel Duffield
Duffield, Nigel. 2001. VP-syntax in Vietnamese and other South East Asian
Languages. Ms. MPI, Nijmegen.
Predicate raising in S.E. Asian languages
- Andrew Simpson
Simpson, Andrew. 1997. Predicate raising in S.E. Asian languages. In Proceedings
of NELS 28.
Event phrase and a theory of functional categories
- Lisa Travis
Travis, Lisa. 1994. Event phrase and a theory of functional categories. In P.
Koskinen (ed.) Proceedings of the 1994 Annual Conference of the Canadian
Linguistics Association: Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics.
Modal verbs must be raising verbs
- Susi Wurmbrand
Wurmbrand, Susi. 1999. Modal verbs must be raising verbs. In Proceedings of
WCCFL 18. Stanford: CSLI Publications.