Chapter

Chapter 6. Temporal reference in Vietnamese

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Abstract

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.

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... Outside of the Americas, tenselessness has also been identified in Inuit languages (e.g. West Greenlandic; (Shaer 2003;Bittner 2005;Bittner 2008), but also Chinese ( (Lin 2003;Lin 2010), Vietnamese (Duffield 2007;Bui 2019), Korean and Japanese (Lee & Tonhauser 2010), Hausa (Mucha 2012;Mucha 2013) and Samoan (Bochnak 2016;Bochnak, Hohaus & Mucha 2019), among others. So-called 'tenselessness' has also been noted in various Creoles & Pidgins (cf. ...
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So-called ‘zero’ or ‘null’ tenses have often been characterized as functionally deficient forms, deprived of any inherent content. In this paper, we will focus on the semantics of a morpho-phonologically null inflectional verbal paradigm in Anindilyakwa (Groote Eylandt, N.T., Australia, which is both temporally and aspectually underspecified. Through a quantitative corpus study conducted in the paper, we establish that ‘zero inflection’ in this language, contra prior works on such tenses in general (e.g. Bybee 1990) and in Anindilyakwa in particular (Bednall 2019), presents various degrees of sensitivity to traditional Vendlerian aspectual parameters. We show that while telicity is not a significant predictor for the temporal interpretation of zero-inflected Anindilyakwa verbs, and dynamicity is a good but not very good predictor, only a very broad opposition between change-of-state (including qua boundedness) and non-change-of-state, or perfective/imperfective, gives very significant biases towards past vs. present anchoring. We also show that atomic telicity is the only categorical Aktionsart predictor for temporal anchoring in this context correctly predict the temporal anchoring of such verbs, and stativity is not biased towards present interpretations, thereby questioning currently received typological theories of the semantics of so-called ‘zero-tenses’ / aspectuo-temporally underspecified tenses.
... Much of the discussion in the literature on article-less languages involves languages like Russian or Serbo-Croatian where articles are simply absent (although there are expressions such as proper names, demonstratives, etc., that explicitly encode definiteness). It has been discussed in the literature whether nominal arguments in these languages have a full DP structure, or rather a lower cut-off point; see, for example, Chierchia (1998), Bošković (2008), Bošković & Gajevski (2011), Alexopoulou & Folli (2011, 2019. The same issue arises for Vietnamese and is addressed in Phan & Lander (2015), who convincingly show that Vietnamese is not a DP-language. ...
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In this contribution we discuss the factors determining the definite or indefinite interpretation of Noun Phrases in Vietnamese. In contrast to what has been claimed in the literature, we find that NPs consisting of a bare noun and NPs consisting of a numeral, a classifier (cl) and a noun, while generally indefinite, may permit a definite interpretation in certain contexts (in contrast to NPs consisting of just a classifier and a noun, which are always definite). We then compare the relevant patterns in Vietnamese with their counterparts in Mandarin and Cantonese. Although the differences may seem striking we show that they can be captured by some simple morpho-syntactic parameters.
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Many so-called ‘zero tense’-marked (which we define as morphologically reduced and underspecified inflections) or untensed verb forms found in tenseless languages, have been characterized as context dependent for their temporal and aspectual interpretation, with the verb’s aspectual content (either as event structure or viewpoint properties) being given more or less prominent roles in their temporal anchoring. In this paper, we focus on a morpho-phonologically reduced inflectional verbal paradigm in Anindilyakwa (Groote Eylandt archipelago, NT, Australia), which is both temporally and aspectually underspecified, and constitutes an instance of zero tense as defined above. On the basis of a quantitative study of an annotated corpus of zero-inflected utterances, we establish that in the absence of independent overt or covert temporal information, the temporal anchoring of this ‘zero tense’ exhibits complex patterns of sensitivity to event structural parameters. Notably we establish that while dynamicity/stativity and telicity/atelicity are to some extent valuable predictors for the temporal interpretation of zero tense in Anindilyakwa, only atomicity (i.e., event punctuality) and boundedness categorically impose a past temporal anchoring—this confirms insights found in previous works, both on Anindilyakwa and on other languages, while also differing from other generalisations contained in these works. Our analysis also shows that unlike several zero tenses identified in various languages (especially in Pidgins and Creoles), Anindilyakwa zero tense-marked dynamic utterances do not correlate with a past temporal reading. Rather, we show that Anindilyakwa seems to come closest to languages possessing zero tensed-verbs (or tenseless verbs) where boundedness monotonically enforces a past temporal anchoring, such as Navajo and Mandarin Chinese. We also show that aspect-independent temporal information appears to determine the temporal anchoring of all zero tense-marked unbounded atelic utterances (both stative and dynamic) in Anindilyakwa—a fact at once conflicting with some claims made in previous works on zero tenses, while confirming results from past studies of Indigenous languages of the Americas (especially Yucatec Maya), concerning the role of temporal anaphora in the temporal interpretation of ‘tenseless’ verb forms.
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en Traffic in mega‐urban Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) demonstrates the transformative powers of vehicles and transport infrastructures. Like eddies of a river, traffic flows are abiotic actors – other‐than‐human physical phenomena that influence how traffic makes its way. But the liquid sense of flow in Vietnamese imaginings has unique qualities that challenge singular conceptualisations of the Anthropocene. Moving beyond human‐centredness, this paper re‐imagines traffic of metropolitan HCMC as the (m)ôtô‐cene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine transformations of diurnal patterns of banal journey‐making where infrastructure routinely fails and ask how abiotic actors shape ways of inhabiting the Anthropocene and living with roads. Flux et inondations: mobilités, vie sur les routes et acteurs abiotiques de la (m)ôtô‐cene fr Le pouvoir transformateur des véhicules et des infrastructures de transport sur la vie sociale est démontré par le trafic dans la ville contemporaine de Ho Chi Minh Ville (HCMC), au Vietnam. HCMC est l’une des villes qui se développent le plus rapidement au monde et le Vietnam est devenu l’émetteur de carbone dont la croissance est la plus rapide au monde. Les flux de circulation, comme les remous d’une rivière, sont des acteurs abiotiques ‐‐ des phénomènes physiques autres qu’humains qui, s’ils ne sont pas vivants, ne sont pas stériles ni dénués de vie. Ils ont le potentiel d’influencer la façon dont le trafic se déplace et se fraye un chemin. Mais le sens liquide de la circulation dans l’imaginaire vietnamien du monde semble avoir des qualités uniques qui remettent potentiellement en question des conceptualisations singulières de l’Anthropocène qui sont autrement consi‐dérées comme universelles. Dépassant le caractère humain des relations avec l’environ‐nement, cet article ré‐imagine l’auto‐Anthropocène dans le contexte particulier de la métropole HCMC: le (m)ôtô‐cène. En s’appuyant sur un travail ethnographique de terrain à long terme auprès de migrants sans papiers, de résidents à mobilité ascendante et d’usagers des transports en commun depuis 2012, j’examine les façons d’être mobile et les transformations des schémas diurnes de déplacements banals dans une région en méga‐urbanisation rapide où les infrastructures sont régulièrement défaillantes. J’explore de quelle manière et dans quelle mesure les acteurs abiotiques façonnent les façons d’habiter l’Anthropocène et de vivre avec les routes.
Chapter
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.
Article
Full-text available
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.
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This book is the first book-length study on the Swedish present perfect. It provides an in-depth exploration of the present perfect in English, German and Swedish. It is claimed that only a discourse-based ExtendedNow-approach fully accounts for the present perfect. The main claim is that the length of the ExtendedNow-interval varies cross-linguistically. The book is couched within the framework of the Discourse Representation Theory and also within Distributed Morphology. It is shown that Swedish provides empirical evidence against all previous research in the field. The following questions are investigated: Is it possible to assign a single uniform meaning to the present perfect? How can we account for the different readings of the perfect? How can we account for the cross-linguistic variation? These issues are addressed from a comparative perspective by integrating previous research on the present perfect. This book is of interest to all those working in the field of tense and aspect.
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Language can employ a variety of tense markings to locate situations in time. In some languages, these markings express a past vs. non-past distinction, and in some others a future vs. non-future distinction. However, not all natural languages employ "verb forms" or tense markings to locate situations in time. This article examines the syntax and semantics of some (potentially) tenseless languages, and the ways in which tenselessness is identified. It also discusses possible mechanisms and variations in which temporal location is expressed in tenseless languages, syntactic properties associated with such languages, and possible challenges in establishing that a language is tenseless, with a special focus on Mandarin Chinese, Kalaallisut, and St'át'imcets. After considering the criteria for tenselessness, the article looks at Chinese as a tenseless language, present time reference, past time reference, and future time reference. It also describes four syntactic properties associated with lack of tense: the existence of bare nominal predicates, lack of expletive subjects, lack of finite/non-finite distinction, and lack of case-motivated movement.
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This paper provides a formal analysis of the grammatical encoding of temporal information in Hausa (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic), thereby contributing to the recent debate on temporality in languages without overt tense morphology. By testing the hypothesis of covert tense against recently obtained empirical data, the study yields the result that Hausa is tenseless and that temporal reference is pragmatically inferred from aspectual, modal and contextual information. The second part of the paper addresses the coding of future in particular. It is shown that future time reference in Hausa is realized as a combination of a modal operator and a Prospective aspect marker, involving the modal meaning components of intention and prediction as well as event time shifting. The discussion relates directly to recent approaches to other seemingly tenseless languages such as St’át’imcets (Matthewson, Linguist Philos 29:673–713, 2006) or Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser, Linguist Philos 34:257–303, 2011b) and provides further evidence for the suggested analyses of the future markers in these languages.
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This paper contributes data from Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní) to the discussion of how temporal reference is determined in tenseless languages. The empirical focus of this study is on finite clauses headed by verbs inflected only for person/number information, which are compatible only with non-future temporal reference in most matrix clause contexts. The paper first explores the possibility of accounting for the temporal reference of such clauses with a phonologically empty non-future tense morpheme, along the lines of Matthewson’s (Linguist Philos 29:673–713, 2006) analysis of a similar phenomenon in St’át’imcets (Salish). This analysis is then contrasted with one according to which temporal reference is not constrained by tense in Paraguayan Guaraní, but only by context and temporal adverbials. A comparison of the two analyses, both of which are couched in a dynamic semantic framework, suggests empirical and theoretical advantages of the tenseless analysis over the tensed one. The paper concludes with a discussion of cross-linguistic variation of temporal reference in tensed and tenseless languages.
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This article presents some data from Vietnamese that provide significant empirical support for the theoretical claims articulated in Klein (1998, 2006): first, that finiteness should be understood as a composite of tense and assertion, and that assertion may be realized independently of tense marking; second, that the assertion operator so realized has only partial scope over elements of the clause, so that fronted elements may evade this scopal influence. Vietnamese is of special interest because - as claimed here - it expresses assertion independently of Tense or Aspect: in this regard Vietnamese contrasts with most Indo-European languages, as well as with other isolating East Asian languages. The formal analysis of these data involves two further theoretical claims. The first is that assertion is syntactically projected in a comparatively low functional projection, immediately above vP: this claim is thus opposed to recent proposals that would place these type of functional category higher (on the left periphery of the clause). The second claim developed here is that in Vietnamese the displacement of certain underspecified constituents is explained by their requirement to come within - alternatively, to evade - the scope of this assertion operator. That is, syntactic movement may be driven by considerations other than purely formal feature checking.
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1. The plot In the early seventies, Barbara Partee suggested that tenses in natural languages might not be operators, but pronouns. Like pronouns, they have indexical, anaphoric, and bound variable uses. In this short presentation, I will discuss one more parallel between tenses and pronouns. Sometimes, tense features are not interpreted at all, a phenomenon traditionally called 'sequence of tense'. Here are some illustrations: (1) John decided a week ago that in ten days he would say to his mother that they were having their last meal together. (Abusch 1988)
Article
This paper contributes to the debate about ‘tenseless languages’ by defending a tensed analysis of a superficially tenseless language. The language investigated is St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish). I argue that although St’át’imcets lacks overt tense morphology, every finite clause in the language possesses a phonologically covert tense morpheme; this tense morpheme restricts the reference time to being non-future. Future interpretations, as well as ‘past future’ would-readings, are obtained by the combination of covert tense with an operator analogous to Abusch’s (1985) WOLL. I offer St’át’imcets-internal evidence (of a kind not previously adduced) that the WOLL-like operator is modal in nature. It follows from the analysis presented here that there are only two (probably related) differences between St’át’imcets and English in the area of tense. The first is that St’át’imcets lacks tense morphemes which are pronounced. The second is that the St’át’imcets tense morpheme is semantically underspecified compared to English ones. In each of these respects, the St’át’imcets tense morpheme displays similar properties to pronouns, which may be covert and which may fail to distinguish person, number or gender. Along the way, I point out several striking and subtle similarities in the interpretive possibilities of St’át’imcets and English. I suggest that these similarities may reveal non-accidental properties of tense systems in natural language. I conclude with discussion of the implications of the analysis for cross-linguistic variation, learnability and the possible existence of tenseless languages.
Article
This paper outlines a framework of the temporal interpretation in Chinese with a special focus on complement and relative clauses. It argues that not only does Chinese have no morphological tenses but there is no need to resort to covert semantic features under a tense node in order to interpret time in Chinese. Instead, it utilises various factors such as the information provided by default aspect, the tense-aspect particles, and pragmatic reasoning to determine the temporal interpretation of sentences. It is shown that aspectual markers in Chinese play the same role that tense plays in a tense language. This result implies that the Chinese phrase structure has AspP above VP but no TP is above AspP.
Article
The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851; Bergsland 1955; Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently, however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is, in fact, tenseless. This paper settles the debate, in favour of Shaer, based on text studies examining how the English future auxiliaries will/would and is/was going to are rendered in Kalaallisut translations of five books: Harry Potter, The Old Man and the Sea, Pippi Longstocking (translated from the Swedish), The Blind Colt, and Black Star, Bright Dawn. The results of these five text studies are reported here in detail and in theory-neutral terms. They conclusively show that Kalaallisut is truly tenseless, but has an alternative system that conveys temporal information, even about the future, as precisely as the English tenses.
On the ‘present perfect puzzle’
  • Pancheva