TY - JOUR A1 - Tran, Thuan T1 - Non-canonical word order and temporal reference in Vietnamese JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - The paper revisits Duffield's (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765-814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a 'when'-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713-756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A 'when'-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure, 279-299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their noncanonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past. KW - Vietnamese KW - accomplishment composition KW - temporal reference KW - generic KW - modification KW - temporal modification Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0256 SN - 0024-3949 SN - 1613-396X VL - 59 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 34 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bruening, Benjamin A1 - Tran, Thuan T1 - The nature of the passive, with an analysis of Vietnamese JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - We attempt to clarify a great deal of confusion in the literature on what a passive is, and what counts as a passive in different languages. We do this through a detailed investigation of what has been identified as a passive in Vietnamese, sentences with the morphemes bi and duoc. We also compare these to Mandarin Chinese bei. We show that these morphemes are not passive at all: like English auxiliaries, they may occur with either an active complement or a passive one. We clarify this point and what it means to be a passive. Second, sentences with these morphemes and the corresponding sentences without them are truth-conditionally equivalent. We show that the extra meaning they convey is a type of projective, or not-at-issue, meaning that is separate from the at-issue content of the sentence. We provide a detailed syntactic and semantic analysis of Vietnamese, and give arguments for this analysis. We propose that there is no movement in Vietnamese, but there is in Chinese, and this difference accounts for differences between the two languages. We also clarify what agent-oriented adverbs of the 'deliberately' type show, and draw conclusions about English get passives and tough constructions. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Passive KW - Vietnamese KW - Mandarin Chinese KW - Projective meaning KW - Agent-oriented adverbs Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.07.008 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 165 SP - 133 EP - 172 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -