Abstract

Several semantic and syntactic distinctions, which have largely been neglected in the Vietnamese linguistic literature, are drawn together in this paper in a comparative context with other better-studied languages in order to indicate that Inner Aspect is projected within the VP shell and independently of the projection of Outer Aspect – a structural proposal originally advanced by Travis (2010). Overall, Vietnamese with its isolating character and rigid word order provides us with unusually direct evidence for an articulated VP structure.

Highlights

  • In the theoretical literature on aspect, it is widely held that two kinds of aspect should be distinguished: grammatical aspect and lexical aspect

  • It is much less clear whether situation aspect has a position in phrase-structure, as it is rarely morphologically realized and its interpretation is dependent on other elements such as the type of the predicate Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 12-1 (2013), 41-62

  • This paper argues that both aspectual categories are syntactically encoded in Vietnamese, though by different means

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Summary

Introduction

In the theoretical literature on aspect, it is widely held that two kinds of aspect should be distinguished: grammatical aspect and lexical aspect. Another significant implication of this approach is that telicity, i.e. Inner Aspect, is not determined by the inherent lexical property of the main verb alone, and by other lexical elements contained within the verb phrase, including the object DP, as well as other independently projected postverbal particles. Preverbal elements, consisting of the anterior morpheme đã and the progressive đang/đương, are usually independent of the timeline that includes the utterance time and serve to anchor the event time to a certain reference time For this and other reasons, they are argued in Duffield and Phan (2010), to be manifestations of Outer Aspect (in the relational sense of Klein 1994), rather than Tense elements, as more traditionally supposed. I will show how telicity is expressed in Vietnamese (section 2), and how telicity is encoded syntactically in this language, which matches well with the Travis’s tree (section 3), and I will end with a speculation note on the internal structure of causative constructions, which might further support this tree

Compositionality of telicity in Vietnamese
Abbreviations used
Immediate consequence
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