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Chapter 4. A more perfect unification: Exploring a Nano-syntactic solution to Vietnamese đã
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.
... Alternatively, Phan & Duffield (2019b), based on Nanosyntax's Phrasal Spellout assumption , propose that đã is not an indivisible node in the tree but rather spells out a whole phrase from PerfectP to PastP, as in (38). ...
... Alternatively, Phan & Duffield (2019b) capture the fact that không and chưa are featurally complex -containing not just negation, but also other hierarchically ordered features which result in different interpretations -by proposing that they, like đã, are the lexicalisation of phrases themselves under the Phrasal Spellout assumption . The loss of the perfect reading of đã in the presence of negative không/chưa is explained on the basis of the competition among these lexical phrases (đã, chưa, không) when it comes to spelling out the syntactic structure AspectP < NegationP < TenseP. ...
... 1 The earlier version of this chapter was published in Phan & Duffield (2019b).It will be indicated later on that the revisited version proposed in this chapter indeed overcomes the shortcoming of the earlier version. 2 These properties are not novel cross-linguistically. There is a well-observed restriction on how certain kinds of aspect can appear/disappear in negative contexts (Matthews 1990, Miestamo & Van der Auwera 2011, Li 1999. ...
We argue that head movement, as an operation that builds head-adjunction structures in the syntax, has been used to model two empirically distinct classes of phenomena. One class has to do with displacement of heads (fully formed morphological words) to higher syntactic positions, and includes phenomena like verb second and verb initiality. The other class has to do with the construction of complex morphological words and is involved in various types of word formation. Based on the very different clusters of properties associated with these two classes of phenomena, we argue that they each should be accounted for by distinct grammatical operations, applying in distinct modules of the grammar, rather than by the one traditional syntactic head movement operation. We propose that the operation responsible for upward displacement of heads is genuine syntactic movement (Internal Merge) and has the properties of syntactic phrasal movement, including the ability to affect word order, the potential to give rise to interpretive effects, and the locality associated with Internal Merge. On the other hand, word formation is the result of postsyntactic amalgamation, realized as either Lowering (Embick and Noyer 2001) or its upward counterpart, Raising. This operation, we argue, has properties that are not associated with narrow syntax: it is morphologically driven, it results in word formation, it does not exhibit interpretive effects, and it has stricter locality conditions (the Head Movement Constraint). The result is a view of head movement that not only accounts for the empirical differences between the two classes of head movement phenomena, but also lays to rest numerous perennial theoretical problems that have heretofore been associated with the syntactic head adjunction view of head movement. In addition, the framework developed here yields interesting new predictions with respect to the expected typology of head movement patterns.
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.
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.
Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Nanosyntax is a new approach to the architecture of language, designed to make (better) sense of the new empirical picture emerging from recent years of syntactic research. It is a large-scale project, addressing a wide array of issues, ranging from big issues such as the modularity of language, to fine details, such as the derivation of allomorphy in irregular patterns of given languages and its interaction with syntactic structures.
By offering the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, Exploring Nanosyntax fills a major gap in the current theoretical literature. Originating within the generative Principles and Parameters tradition in the study of language, nanosyntax was developed starting in the early 2000s by Michal Starke. Deploying a radical implementation of the cartographic “one feature–one head” maxim, the framework aims at a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure, thus laying bare the building blocks of the universal functional sequence. This volume aims at making three contributions. First, it presents the framework’s constitutive tools and principles and explains how nanosyntax relates to cartography and to Distributed Morphology. Second, the volume illustrates how nanosyntactic tools and principles can be applied within a range of empirical domains of natural language. In doing so, the volume provides a range of detailed and crosslinguistic investigations that uncover novel empirical data and that contribute to a better understanding of the functional sequence. Finally, new theoretical strands internal to the nanosyntactic framework are explored, with specific problems raised and discussed. The volume contains original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field and constitutes an ideal handbook for advanced students and researchers in linguistics. Above all, Exploring Nanosyntax offers the first encompassing view of this promising framework, making its methodology and exciting results accessible to a wide audience.
This paper investigates the place of Vietnamese in the binary NP/DP typology as formulated by Bošković (2005, 2008, 2009, 2010). Vietnamese patterns with NP languages when it comes to its lack of a genuine definite determiner, the presence of radical pro-drop, and its lack of number morphology, but it patterns with DP languages when it comes to the presence of TP, subject expletives, and subject-object extraction asymmetries. The mixed status of Vietnamese suggests that the difference between article and article-less languages might not be as straightforward or clearcut as Bošković claims. In fact, the way these properties pattern in Vietnamese reveals that there are at least three smaller parameters (nominal, clausal, and quantificational) at stake, not just the presence or absence of DP, and that these three are independently fixed as [-DP], [+TP], and [-movement], respectively. Also important is the fact that Vietnamese is a topic-prominent language.
This chapter discusses the principles underlying the economy of derivation and representation. It begins by considering a range of assumptions concerning language design, with particular emphasis on the Extended Standard Theory (EST) framework, understood in the sense of the principles-and-parameters model. It distinguishes the lexicon from the language's computational system, the syntax in a broad sense (including phonology). It assumes that the syntax provides three fundamental levels of representation, each constituting an “interface” of the grammatical system with some other system of the mind/brain: D-Structure, Phonetic Form, and Logical Form. In accordance with the general EST framework, the three levels are assumed to be related to one another not directly, but only through the intermediary level of S-Structure. The chapter also examines some of the properties of verbal inflection, the separate syntactic status of Tense and Agreement, and whether both derivations and representations are subject to a certain form of “least effort” condition.
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.
Minimalism and semantic syntax: Interpreting multifunctionality in Vietnamese
- Duffield
- Nguyen
In preparation. The nanosyntax of Vietnamese negators. Ms, University of Languages & International Studies
- Trang Phan
Một lần nữa về phạm trù thì trong tiếng Việt
- Panfilov
On syntactic categories
- Travis