Chapter 5, Overview/Introduction

In this chapter, which revises and extends ideas in Duffield (2010, forthcoming), also Duffield & Phan (2010), Phan (in prep.), I turn attention to the functional architecture within the VP,  developing a number of proposals about the lexicon-syntax interface made by Lisa Travis in recent work (Travis 2000, 2010), according to which verbal properties traditionally viewed as syntactically inert are associated with autonomous structural projections (see also Hale & Keyser 1993). Among other claims, Travis’ proposals distinguish the base position of Agents/Intentional Causers ([Spec, V1]) from those of arguments interpreted as non-volitional or ‘inadvertent’ Causes ([Spec, Asp]). Travis (2008) also syntactically represents the event structure of a clause through the projection of an independent Event Phrase, located immediately above VP1 (or vP, in other analyses). Empirical support for these two claims has come mainly from Malagasy (to a lesser extent from Tagalog).

One of the central purposes of this chapter is to show how these proposals offer a natural account of a number of systematic alternations in the Vietnamese verb-phrase (especially with respect to causative and resultative constructions involving the causative verb làm in conjunction with unaccusative vs. unergative predicates). These particular effects in Vietnamese are of interest not only because they provide evidence of the generalizability of Travis’ proposals to an isolating language, but also precisely because of the significant syntactic differences among SE Asian languages with respect to causativization (Vietnamese, for instance, disallows the NP1 V1 V2 NP2 order observed in Chinese, often analyzed as “verb incorporation”). This chapter, therefore, has two goals: to articulate the syntax of Vietnamese verb-phrases with reference to a universal template (involving Inner Aspect, and Event Phrase projections) while still accounting for cross-linguistic variation in VP-structure within the South East Asian linguistic area (Capell 1979).