Chapter 4, Introduction/Overview

This chapter offers an elaborated revision of Duffield (2007, 2009) and Duffield & Phan (2010), focusing on the distribution and interpretation of Tense and Assertion morphemes in Vietnamese, and their interaction with negation, as well as on the syntactic and semantic differences between pre-verbal and post-verbal ‘Aspect’ markers in this language. It re-presents the claim that modality in general, including markers of illocutionary force and polarity emphasis are projected low in Vietnamese, and suggests that this may be true more generally, confirming earlier work by Aoun & Li (1993). As well as contributing new data with respect to Tense and Modality, and correcting some errors in Duffield (2007), the analysis takes into account more recent Minimalist work on Vietnamese clause-structure, most notably work by Trinh ((Trinh 2005), 2006). Central to this new discussion will be a detailed treatment of pre-verbal TAM morphemes in Vietnamese, especially of distributional and interpretive constraints distinguishing the “future” and “past tense” morphemes (sẽ vs. đã).