Struktur und Interpretation der linken Satzperipherie im Vietnamesischen
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The research contributed to the resolution of two current questions of theoretical significance, based on a descriptive and theoretical analysis of Vietnamese, an isolating language. The first question was concerned with the competition between the Cartographic and the non- Cartographic approach to syntactic issues raised by Information Structure. The findings lent support to the non-Cartographic approach, according to which the presence of information structural categories in the left periphery is licensed by syntax-internal constraints, not by feature checking. To account for the left periphery phenomenon, it was proposed that Vietnamese employs a pragmatic module that assigns the relevant features to syntactic objects so that they occur felicitously in the discourse structure. The second issue was related to the question of whether the grammatical category ‘tense’ is universal across languages. Originated from inflectional languages, ‘tense’ standardly refers to the correlation between some morphological form on verbal elements and temporal interpretations. The research confirmed that there is no such correlation in Vietnamese and that Vietnamese can rely on pragmatics to obtain temporal interpretation in the absence of tense-aspect particles. Therefore, ‘tense’ is not an indispensable notion in the description of Vietnamese, and as such ‘tense’ is not universal across languages.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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Beware of discourse markers. In J.M.M Brown, Andreas Schmidt, and Marta Wierzba (Eds.), Of Trees and Birds. A Festschrift for Gisbert Fanselow, 257 – 267, University of Potsdam.
Henry Fominyam
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A unified analysis of Vietnamese mới ‘just/only’ as a scale-sensitive particle. In P.G Grosz, L. Marti, H. Pearson, Y. Sudo, and S. Zobel (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25, 823 –840. University College London and Queen Mary University of London.
Malte Zimmermann
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Non-canonical word order and temporal reference in Vietnamese. Linguistics, 59(1), 1-34.
Tran, Thuan
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Syntax-information structure interface in Vietnamese. Discourse Particles in Asian Languages Volume II, 237-259. Routledge.
Tran, Thuan
