The Syntax of Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation

The Syntax of Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation investigates familiar grammatical phenomena including Tense, Aspect, and Negation in a theoretically understudied language, Vietnamese.

The purpose of this book is to thoroughly examine how these categories are realised and how they interact with one another in Vietnamese in the spirit of Generative Grammar, in particular, the Cartographic approach to syntax and its most recently developed lexicalisation technique, Nanosyntax. It is concluded that despite lacking inflectional tense, Vietnamese does have syntactic tense, i.e., Vietnamese has those structural positions which are dedicated to Tense and Aspect. In fact, Tense and Aspect in Vietnamese are realised via a rigid fine-grained functional sequence which syntacticises subtle semantic distinctions both preverbally and post-verbally. There is a two-way complicated relationship between Negation and Aspect in Vietnamese, which can be explained in a principled way by taking into consideration how the internal syntax of the temporal, aspectual, and negative markers derives their clausal syntax. This book also discusses how Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation pattern with, and differ from, their counterparts in Western Indo-European languages, and how this study contributes to a better understanding of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages more generally, as well as of language universally.

This book will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary linguistics, and for scholars interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics, and Southeast Asian languages more generally.

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).