Structure and Interpretation of the Left Periphery in Vietnamese

• Applicant: Dr. Thuan Tran, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 324793876

The project aims at contributing to the theoretical understanding of the left periphery, including e.g. the inventory and interpretation of functional projections in natural language, and their status as universal or language-specific. To the latter end, the project adopts a cross-linguistic perspective, by looking at an isolating language, Vietnamese (Mon-Khmer, Austro-Asiatic), and by comparing the findings for Vietnamese with that of much better studied inflectional languages of the Indo-European type. The exploration also complements the (partially inconclusive) investigations into Chinese, another isolating language but of a different family. As the first comprehensive formal study of left-periphery and syntax-semantics interface in Vietnamese, the project is concerned with two cross linguistic questions: how does syntax incorporate information structural categories? Namely, do information structural categories project in the syntactic structure? Based on the novel empirical data from Vietnamese, the project will specifically compare cartographic (Rizzi 1997 and follow-up work) with non-cartographic approaches (Fanselow 2006, et al.) to syntax. And is the grammatical category tense universal across languages? To be more specific, do isolating languages make available a head tense T filled by covert material? Or are they genuinely tenseless both from a syntactic and a semantic perspective? A third question is language specific and deals with temporal interpretation effects arising from ex-situ wh-questions and other instances of left dislocation: what is the nature of the correlation between temporal construal and left dislocation? Is it semantic or pragmatic? The answer to this question will enrich our knowledge of human language given that an association between word order and temporal resolution of this type is unattested in inflectional Indo-European languages. In sum, the project will offer the first formal syntactic and semantic investigation of the left periphery and the syntax-semantics interface in Vietnamese, and its cross-linguistic implications. Methodologically, the project is empirically driven in that hypothesis testing is primarily based on data collected from fieldwork and on experiment evidence while native speakers intuition and data available in the literature serve as hypothesis building guidelines only.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants