Syntax of Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation

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).

• PREFACEABBREVIATIONSCHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION1. Objectives2. Why Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation?3. Research questions4. Theoretical assumptions5. Outline of the bookCHAPTER 2: SYNTACTICISING TENSEDNESS1. Introduction2. Theoretical background3. Non-peripherality4. Non-optionality5. The hierarchy of tense and aspect6. Other properties associated with tensedness6.1. Bare predicates6.2. Finiteness6.3. Expletive subjects7. ConclusionCHAPTER 3: DECOMPOSING THE PERFECT1. Introduction2. Theoretical background3. The semantic compositionality of đã3.1. Achievements and đã3.2. States and đã3.3. Activities and đã3.4. Accomplishments and đã3.5. Discussion4. The interaction between đã and negative/interrogative markers không/chýa4.1. Đã in the absence of negative không/chưa4.2. Đã in the presence of negative không/chưa4.3. Đã in the presence of interrogative không/chưa4.4. Discussion5. The Interaction between đã and other preverbal elements6. ConclusionCHAPTER 4: CALCULATING TELICITY1. On the compositionality of telicity in Vietnamese1.1. Inherently telic verbs1.2. Telic particles1.3. Numeral direct object1.4. Other factors2. The syntactic projection of telicity in Vietnamese3. Immediate consequence: Thematic hierarchy in causatives4. Extension5. ConclusionCHAPTER 5: DECOMPOSING THE NEGATORS1. Introduction2. Negation and Lexical Aspect3. Negation and Grammatical Aspect: the differences between không and chưa4. Negation and Interrogativity4.1. A cross-linguistic perspective4.2. The similarities between negative không/chưa and interrogative không/chưa4.3. Differences between negative không/chưa and interrogative không/chưa4.4. A proposal for the featural make-up of không and chưa5. ConclusionCHAPTER 6: EXPLAINING THE NEGATION CONSTRAINT ON ASPECT1. Introduction2. Previous accounts3. Explaining the negation constraint: The Nanosyntactic approach4. ConclusionCHAPTER 7: FINAL REMARKS1. 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?

‘There is tense in “tenseless” languages. This book investigates key aspects of the clause structure of an understudied language in a remarkably clear and insightful way. It’s a beautiful example of the richness of modern generative linguistics. Also Vietnamese now becomes a protagonist in the exciting debate on the nature of crosslinguistic variation.’- Professor Gennaro Chierchia, Harvard University.‘This book is of a very high value, not just for researchers specializing in Vietnamese linguistics, but clearly for all theoretical linguists. Vietnamese is a language of a very specific type; it is an analytic language with no inflection typically wearing its logical structure on its sleeves. As such, results arrived at for Vietnamese will very often have direct repercussions for the analysis of other languages as well.’- Prof. Dr. Daniel Hole, University of Stuttgart