Chapter 3, Introduction/Overview

3.    Head-First: Some Consequences of Head-Initiality in Vietnamese

This chapter considers what Vietnamese can tell us about proposed macro-parameters of language variation (“Asian languages” vs. others) with respect to four syntactic phenomena:

1. The position of complementizers. Cheng’s (1997) Clause-Typing Hypothesis, which assumes that sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese Y-N questions are (final) complementizers. Vietnamese has such particles but it also has initial complementizers, raising questions about the validity of the CTH both for Vietnamese, and for Chinese (see also (Huang 2008)). Evidence from Irish will also be brought to bear on this question (cf. (Oda 2005)). This discussion also speaks to carthographic theories of the left periphery (Rizzi 1997): Vietnamese provides evidence for a fractionated CP comprising several distinct functional heads).
2. Wh-questions (reply to Bruening and Tran 2006)
3. The structure of relative clauses. Fukui & Takano (1999)’s explanation of the contrast between English and Japanese/Chinese relative clauses. Contra (Kayne 1995), F&T propose that languages are underlyingly head-final, and that head-initial structures in TP and DP are the consequence of N->D raising in English-type languages. F&T attempt to derive many of the other contrasts between English and Japanese, e.g., that head-final languages tend to have internally-headed RCs, have classifiers rather than determiners, and fail to show island effects, from this alleged difference in head-movement. Vietnamese proves problematic because it clearly shows mixed properties: interpretively and morphologically—as a classifier language—it behaves like Japanese, yet structurally it patterns with English, in having relative pronouns and being head-initial, in the demonstrable absence of N->D raising.
4. The structure of verb-phrases. Huang’s (1994) parametric explanation of the Post-verbal Structure Constraint in Chinese, first detailed in Huang (1982), proposes an articulated VP-structure inspired by (Larson 1988), and much subsequent work. According to Huang (1994), differences between English and Chinese are explained in terms of the extent of verb-movement in the two languages. Vietnamese again presents an empirical challenge for this parametric account: with respect to verb-movement, it behaves (largely) like Chinese, yet shows none of the presumed effects of the parameter-setting (i.e, no PSC effects, no verb copying, no correlate of the Chinese BA-construction). Here, I investigate the idea that differences between Vietnamese and Chinese are attributable instead to the Head Parameter: in contrast to Vietnamese, Chinese VPs are really head-final (as Huang originally claimed).