Abstract In this paper, some data are presented from Vietnamese that provide significant empirical support for

the theoretical claims articulated in Klein (1998, in press): first, that finiteness should be understood as a composite of tense and assertion, and that assertion may be realized independently of tense marking; second, that the assertion operator so realized has only partial scope over elements of the clause, so that fronted elements may evade this scopal influence. Vietnamese is of special interest because it expresses assertion quite independently of tense or aspect: it differs in this regard from most Indo-European languages, as well as from other isolating East Asian languages. The formal analysis of these data involves two further, quite unorthodox, claims: that assertion is syntactically projected in a low functional projection immediately above vP; here, the clear parallelisms between Vietnamese assertion markers, and English do -support suggest that the latter is not a language-specific mechanism as usually supposed, but the reflex of a more universal rule. The second claim developed here is that in Vietnamese the displacement of certain constituents is explained by their requirement to come within alternatively, to evade the scope of this assertion operator. That is, syntactic movement may be driven by considerations other than purely formal feature-checking.

Page 1

Aspects of Vietnamese Clausal Structure: Separating Tense from Assertion

1 Introduction* This paper has both descriptive and theoretical goals. Its descriptive purpose is to present some theoretically relevant data from Vietnamese, a language that has received scant attention in contemporary formal linguistics. In this context, the focus is on certain formal features of Vietnamese, which distinguish it from some other more familiar languages of the region. The theoretical focus is on the structural expression of functional categories; specifically, on the expression of tense and assertion. Since Vietnamese is almost completely devoid of inflectional morphology, it should be an excellent candidate for the extremely spare approach to functional categories proposed in Bare Phrase Structure and assumed in much subsequent work in Minimalist Grammar (Chomsky 1995a, 1995b, 1998). I will show here that, despite its morphological impoverishment, Vietnamese provides evidence for at least two distinct functional categories, including Tense Phrase and Assertion Phrase. The focus is principally on the syntactic expression of finiteness. Following the conceptual lead of Klein (1998, in press), finiteness is construed as the merger of two more basic notions:
TENSE

and ASSERTION. Vietnamese will be shown to represent

these notions separately, morphologically and syntactically; as such, it provides particularly clear empirical confirmation of Kleins theoretical approach. In this respect, this language contrasts not only with many Indo-European languages, where such notions tend to be conflated, but also with many other South East Asian languages, where one or other notion fails to be reliably structurally expressed.

Page 2

Theoretically, the paper relates and integrates insights from three distinct approaches. First, as just mentioned, I adopt the leading conceptual-semantic idea of Klein (1998, in press) concerning finiteness, namely, that it is decomposable into more basic notions of temporality (tense and mood) and assertion. Kleins position is articulated in some more detail directly below. Second, regarding the syntactic implementation of this idea, I incorporate mechanisms originally due to Chomsky (1957), intended to handle the related phenomena of emphasis, negation and dosupport in a transformational description of English. While some of these ideas have been revised and extended in more recent versions of generative theory up to Minimalism, others, including the treatment of contrastive intonation, have fallen into neglect. In this paper, the Vietnamese data serve to resurrect two aspects of that earlier work. The first of these is that the base position of assertion, and of modality in general, is very low in the functional structure of the clause below Tense, immediately above the lexical vP rather than in the extended CP or left periphery, as is more commonly assumed.1 This claim is schematized in (1) below: TP

(1)

4 4 T AsrP 4 Asr vP

Assertion/Modality = c

The second idea to be re-adopted from Chomsky (1957) is that English do-support is a reflex of a core transformational operation, rather than being a peripheral language-specific strategy to support stray tense and agreement morphology. (Again, I take the latter to represent more current generative assumptions: see, for example, Chomsky & Lasnik 1977; Pollock 1989; Chomsky 1989; Bobaljik 1995). Page 3

Finally, the paper seeks to integrate a multifunctional approach to the varying interpretations of functional elements in different positions.2 Following Lefebvre & Massam (1988) and Travis, Bobaljik & Lefebvre (1998), I construe a multifunctional functional category (MFC) as:

one that is inherently underspecified with the unspecified properties of the host head...[where]...syntax can provide additional information not available in the lexical entry of the item. The lexical entry encode[s] the
INTERSECTION

of the

uses of the item...[d]ifferent senses [of a multifunctional item] follow from the different head positions in which it occurs (Travis, Bobaljik & Lefebvre (1998:3, emphasis in the original).

On this view, the syntactic position of a functional category influences in some cases, fully determines the interpretation of that element. As an example of this type of multifunctionality, consider the alternations in (2), involving the Vietnamese element ai:

(2) a. Anh quen

ai ?

= IN-SITU WH

PRN know ai Who(m) do you know? b. Toi khong quen ai. I NEG know AI = NPI

I dont know anyone.

Page 4

c. Ai co

ay

cung quen.

=UNIV. QUANTIFIER

ai PRN DEM also know She knows everybody.

In (2a), ai functions as a WH-element; the sentence is obligatorily interpreted as an interrogative. Sentence (2b), which is otherwise identical to (2a), contains the sentential negation element khng: here, ai is necessarily interpreted as a negative polarity item (! English anyone). Where ai is fronted from its base-position and in construction with cung, in (2c), it is interpreted as a universal quantifier. This particular set of alternations finds direct parallels in varieties of Chinese that have previously been analyzed by other researchers, including Li, (1992), Tsai (1994) and Cheng (1997). I return to these analyses presently. Note that the principal contribution of the present paper is not to demonstrate that the interpretation of MFCs depends on their position something that Li (1992) and others have already shown well for Chinese but rather to use these varying interpretations to pinpoint more precisely the (low) position of the operators that have scope over these elements. Thanks to the presence and distribution of the assertion marker c in Vietnamese, this is a much more tractable task than in Chinese, and it is here that the main contribution lies. A less familiar alternation is illustrated in (3); to my knowledge, this is peculiar to Vietnamese. This concerns the
WH -adverbial

element bao gi (when), whose

temporal interpretation varies according to its syntactic distribution: in its canonical, post-verbal position (3a), bao gi is assigned a past-tense interpretation; in pre-

Page 5

verbal. or sentence-initial position, bao gi is interpreted as referring to the present or future (3b):

(3) a. Co

ay

i My

bao gi?

PRN DEM go America when When did she leave for America? b. Bao gi co when ay i My?

PRN DEM go America

When will she go to America?

It will be claimed that as with the alternations in (2), those in (3) should be explained in terms of syntactic scope: the varying interpretations of bao gi are determined by being within or outside the scope of some sentential operator. While this general idea has certainly been advanced before, there is some originality in the idea that the relevant operator in this case is an assertion feature projected comparatively low in the phrase-structure, and perhaps less originally, but more controversially from a formal perspective in the idea that MFCs may move for negative reasons in order to evade scope. That is, MFCs may move to avoid being assigned a particular interpretation rather than purely for feature-checking reasons. A variant of this notion of scope evasion constitutes one of Kleins arguments for structurally represented assertion, to which we turn directly.3 The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I briefly outline Kleins theoretical proposals for the separation of tense and assertion, as well as for the (abstract) structural representation of assertion in different clause-types. Following this, in section 3, I set out the varying distributions of the Vietnamese morpheme c, Page 6

and provide an analysis of this element as a relatively pure instantiation of assertion divorced from tense. In this presentation, explicit parallels will be drawn between c and English do -support. Having set out the main analysis in section 3, section 4 revisits Chomskys original analysis: I also provide some additional supporting evidence for low modality, this time from the Vietnamese imperative system. In section 5, I explore some further consequences of the main analysis, and develop a hypothesis about scope evasion that directly accounts for the bao gi alternation (just introduced). Section 6 concludes the paper. 2 Finiteness: Separating Tense and Assertion in IE Languages (Klein 1998, in press) Klein (1998, in press) henceforth K. presents a number of arguments motivating the decomposition of finiteness into two meaning components, separating tense under a particular construal of this notion from what is termed assertion (also, assertion-markedness). Four of the arguments presented by K. are especially relevant to the present discussion, having obvious exponents in Vietnamese: three of these, discussed in sections 2.1-2.3 below, motivate a purely interpretive splitting of the notion of finiteness into tense and assertion; the fourth argument, in 2.5, supports the claim that assertion is not only an autonomous semantic notion (distinct from tense) but that it is also structurally represented in a sentence-medial position. (In section 2.4, I briefly sketch K.s own analysis of how finiteness might be syntactically represented). 2.1. The contrastive intonation argument

The first argument concerns contrastive intonation on English verb forms. K. points out an important distinction between auxiliary verbs including copular verbs and do on the one hand, vs. lexical verbs on the other: whereas contrastive Page 7

intonation on finite auxiliaries can function either to assert or deny the VALIDITY of a prior claim or to contrast the
TIME

about which the assertion is made, the former

function is not available to lexical verbs, which can contrast only the relative time value (or the semantic content of the lexical verb).4 This contrast is illustrated in (4) and (5) below (K.s examples (1) and (2)):

(4) a. The book was on the table. b. The book is on the table No, the book WAS on the table. c. The book was not on the table. No, thats wrong, the book WAS on the table. (5) a. John LOVED Mary. b. John LOVED Mary, but he doesnt love her any longer. c. John LOVED Mary, but he didnt ADORE her. The availability of this validity function in (4c) provides prima facie evidence for Kleins claim that:

the finite element was carries at least two distinct meaning components: 1. the tense component: it marks past, in contrast to present or future; 2. it marks the claim the fact that the situation described by the utterance indeed obtains, in contrast to the opposite claim. (K. in press, pn-pending). K. goes on to observe that it is possible to mark the same function in sentences containing lexical verbs, but ONLY by supplying do-support, as in (6):

Page 8

(6) The idea that he didnt love her is plainly wrong: John DID love Mary.

The contrast between the interpretations available to stressed lexical verbs vs. those available to stressed do indicates that do-support really
DOES

have a function other

than as a host for tense and agreement inflection (as usually supposed); in other words, that do is neither a dummy host in morpho-syntactic terms, nor a true pleonastic, semantically. As will be shown in the next main section, Vietnamese c signals this pure validity function even less ambiguously. 2.2 (Non-relational) Marking of Topic Time

K.s second argument for tense being distinct from assertion concerns the interpretation of English sentences containing simple past forms (as opposed to those involving the present perfect). In question-answer pairs such as those in (7), K. claims that the simple past simply marks the time-span for which an assertion is made, rather than the relationship, contrastive or otherwise, between the utterance time and the event time (which is the standard RELATIONAL construal of tense). Thus, (7ii), for example, is well-formed as an answer, even though the dog is (presumably) still dead at the utterance time:

(7)

Why didnt Mika/the dog come to the park this morning? i. Mika was sick. ii. The dog was dead.

Regarding such sentences, K. writes: What is meant by the simple past is the fact that at some particular time span in the past, Mika was sick, and the dog was dead. An assertion is made only Page 9

about this time in the past, and it is simply left open whether the state obtaining then also obtains later or earlier. IT IS NOT THE TRUTH OF HIS BEING
SICK OR DEAD THAT IS CRUCIAL BUT THE FACT WHETHER ASSERTED ABOUT SOME TIME .

(sic) SOMETHING

IS

Such a time span for which an assertion is

made I will call Topic Time (TT) and it is the function of tense to mark whether TT precedes, contains or follows the time of utterance. The time of the situation itself may precede, contain or follow TT. I think it is this relation between TT and the time of the situation which is traditionally called Aspect (Klein, in press, pn-pending, emphasis in original).

That is to say, the English simple past signals two functions: it indicates tense the temporal relation between Topic Time and Utterance Time and it simultaneously marks the (non-relational) assertion that some state-of-affairs or event obtains at the Topic Time in question. On this construal, the wellformedness of sentence (7.ii) follows from the fact that the use of the simple past in contrast to the more aspectual present perfect involves no claim whatsoever about the relationship between Topic Time and the time of the situation; in other words, no claim is made about the dogs health outside of the Topic Time. Although the
EMPIRICAL CONCEPTUAL

distinction here is relatively clear, the obvious

problem is that, in the English past tense forms, these two functions are

morphologically syncretic. As we shall see directly especially in the discussion of responsive constructions Vietnamese c realizes the assertion function of finiteness directly, unencumbered by any requirement to mark tense.

Page 10

2.3

Tense without assertion: non-declarative sentences

K. observes that non-declarative sentences, such as yes-no questions, imperatives, and norm-creating sentences, can be tense-marked (in his sense) without expressing an assertion.5 Of such sentences, K. remarks: In all of these cases, there is a sentence baseit gives a description of what should be made true (imperatives), is to be decided whether it is true (yes-noquestions), or ought to hold (norm-creating sentences). There is also a counterpart to the topic time. In the imperative, this topic time must be after the utterance time. There is no difference for questions. Norm-creating sentences also hold for the future; sometimes, they explicitly specify the beginning time. So, the crucial difference seems to rely on the notion of assertion (K. in press, pn-pending). Now, if K. is correct in claiming that non-declaratives such as imperatives can be tense-marked without expressing any assertion, then tense and assertion must perforce be separable. However, what is perhaps most important in this discussion and most relevant to Vietnamese is the idea that assertion as a structural notion is intimately linked to illocutionary role; in other words, that assertion is simply one formal value of a more general multi-valued structural operator. K. (1998) states this idea quite explicitly:

It is plausible to assume that tense only marks that some arbitrary time span, for which we keep the term TT, is placed somewhere on the time axis, and that either ASS,
OR , DEPENDING ON THE PARTICULAR ILLOCUTION, SOME

OTHER 'MODALITY MARKER

assigns a special function to this time span. So, Page 11

TT can be the time span for which a claim is made, but it can also be the time span, at which some obligation is put into force (on in whichever way we want to analyse the role of the imperative) (K. 1998, emphasis mine: NGD). Thus, what is crucial here is not only the claim that tense and assertion are separable components of finiteness, but also that ASS is only one possible value of a more complex modality element, whose feature values determine illocutionary force. Precisely these properties are clearly instantiated by Vietnamese c. 2.4 Kleins structural proposal

Thus far, the concern has been to motivate two semantic-conceptual ideas concerning finite clauses: first, that finiteness FIN, in K.s terminology is composed of two more fundamental elements, tense and assertion; second, that assertion is only one value of a multi-valued semantic operator determining the illocutionary force of an utterance. The question now is how these semantic notions are structurally realized, and how they interact with other sentential material to yield well-formed, interpretable utterances. K. (1998, in press) is quite explicit that FIN is always syntactically realized in the logical structure of the sentence (although the reader should be aware that Kleins idea of structural realization is somewhat more abstract than the surface representations to be presented in the remainder of this paper). For K., finite sentences have, abstractly, a rigid tripartite structure. First, there is the
COMPONENT. TOPIC

Minimally, this involves a Topic Time (and topic place), the time (and

place) to which the assertion, or whichever the illocutionary role is, is confined. The topic component may also involve other constituents, including a
TOPIC ENTITY,

typically realized by the grammatical subject. The second component of the tripartite Page 12

structure is what K. terms the

SENTENCE-BASE

notated as INF* in K. (1998)

which conveys the content of the assertion: minimally, this consists of a non-finite predicate and an appropriate filling of its arguments (K in press: pn). Finally, there is the in IE languages composite finiteness element (FIN*) that relates the sentence-base to the topic component. (The asterisk notation denotes the level of representation of these elements: by hypothesis in all utterances, TOP, FIN and INF will be represented at a level of logical structure corresponding to LF in Minimalist terms (as FIN*, INF* and TOP*); however, all three components need not be projected in the surface (PF) representation in every language.) K.s schematisation of this tripartite structure is reproduced in (8) below:

(8)

UTTERANCE TOPIC COMPONENT FIN topic topic topic (topic time place world entity) SENTENCE BASE Vs and arguments

As we shall see directly, in Vietnamese as in some constructions in German this tripartite structure is reflected directly on the surface, with the bonus that Vietnamese overtly splits finiteness into its constituent parts (T and Asr). 2.5 On the partial scope of Finiteness

One potential consequence of this structural arrangement is that (the subconstituents of the finiteness operator) FIN* should only have partial scope over other sentential material; specifically, they should have scope over material to their right, but not to their left.6 Page 13

K. claims that this prediction is borne out by and explains the English contrast in (9) and (10) below. In (10b), the fronting of the adverbial phrase gives rise to the same semantic anomaly as is observed in (9b): in other words, (9b) and (10b) are interpreted identically. For K., this is due to the fact that the fronted adverbial phrase in (10b) is unable to interact with the ASS operator to rescue the interpretation (as it does in (10a)).

(9) a. John was dead. b. ?John has been dead. (10) a. John has been dead for two weeks. b. ?For two weeks, John has been dead.

K. accounts for this in terms of linear scope: If we assume that in English the scope of some operator does not include elements that precede it, and further that FIN* functions like an operator, then the fronting of the adverbial moves the adverbial out from the scope of FIN*, and hence of ASSin other words, FIN* need not necessarily apply to the entire INF*, but may pick up some focused part of it. We shall say that INF* can consist of a press: pn-pending). Again, two points are relevant here: first, that the assertion operator need not take scope over the whole clause; second, that elements may be moved to evade scope, rather than to check formal features. In what follows, I will show how this interpretation of K.s claims including the distinction between Topic and Focus
TOPIC

component, and a FOCUS component (K. in

Page 14

components is directly represented in Vietnamese phrase-structure, as diagrammed in (11): Top TOPIC 4 4 Top
1

(11)

th

4 1

TP

4 T AsrP se

FOCUS

4 ASR vP 1 4 c 4 v

It should be noted in passing that the partial scope of assertion and of other modality operators is directly predicted if assertion is projected low in the structure, as schematized in (11); this interpretive effect would be much more surprising if assertion were a property of CP, in which case no amount of leftward movement would be sufficient to evade scope. Later, it will be shown that dependent elements in Vietnamese need only be fronted to the immediate left of AsrP to evade scope, providing further evidence for this comparatively low position. 3 Separating Tense and Assertion in Vietnamese Having set out a particular interpretation of Kleins proposals about finiteness, we may now consider some Vietnamese data that support these. For the purposes of this analysis, I make three other assumptions concerning Vietnamese phrase-structure, as set out in (12) below. None of these is especially controversial; all three are supported by rather obvious distributional evidence.

Page 15

(12) a. Subject arguments raise overtly to [Spec, TP] b. Lexical verbs do not raise overtly out of the maximal VP (vP). c. In matrix clauses, there is a distinguished initial position for topicalised constituents (TopP); this projection is headed by the topic morpheme th.7 Given these assumptions, the data in the following sections can be shown to provide clear evidence for the syntactic separation of tense and assertion. 3.1. Tense-marking In order to show that tense and assertion are separated in Vietnamese, ideally BOTH should be structurally represented; however, in more traditional treatments of Vietnamese grammar, it is often denied that Vietnamese has tense at all. This is made quite explicit in Nguyen c Dans assertion [T]rong tieng Viet khong co pham tru th(There is no tense in Vietnamese.) (Nguyen c Dan 1998: 116). Presumably, what is meant here is that tense-marking is almost always optional in Vietnamese; this contrasts with its obligatory presence in independent clauses in IE languages. Otherwise, the claim is plainly false, since there exist morphemes whose sole function is to carry temporal information of one kind or another, and which have the distribution of tense or (grammatical) aspect morphemes in more familiar languages. A representative subset of these items is listed in (13); the sentences in (14) and (15) illustrate the distribution of these elements with respect to temporal and manner adverbials, respectively, showing that they are distributed to the right of the former and to the left of the latter:

Page 16

(13) a. se; sap, sap sa b. a ; va, mi, va mi, mi va c. ang

future; near future past; recent past progressive

(14) a.*Anh Lai a

hom qua giup toi.

PRN Lai ANT yesterday help me Anh Lai helped me yesterday. (00/10)8

b. ?Anh Lai hom qua a

giup toi.

PRN Lai yesterday ANT help me Anh Lai helped me yesterday. (07/10)

(15) a. Toi se can than viet la th nay. I FUT carefully write letter DEM I will write the letter carefully. (26/27)

b. *Toi can than se I

viet la-th nay.

carefully FUT write letter DEM (05/27)

I will write the letter carefully.

The examples in (14) and (15) show exactly the distributions that would be expected if these tense morphemes occupy the T node, with lexical verbs remaining in vP in accordance with (12b) above and if adverbial expressions are immediately left-adjoined to the syntactic projection that they modify.9

Page 17

While the principal focus of this paper is on assertion for a more complete discussion of tense and aspect, see Duffield (in preparation) it is nevertheless worth pointing out that these temporal elements do not have exactly the same values as their English equivalents. In particular, the morpheme a, which is usually glossed as past tense, appears to denote a more aspectual relationship between the Topic Time and a preceding situation time, either of which may be independent of the utterance time. Thus for example, in contrast to the English past tense, a may be used in future-perfect contexts, such as that in (16):

(16) a. Ngay mai, neu anh en luc bay gi sang

th

toi a i hoc roi.

tomorrow, if PRN go time seven hours a.m. TOP I ANT go.study already If you come at seven a.m. tomorrow, I will have already gone to study. b. en cuoi nam nay, toi a ra trng.

until end year DEM, PRN ANT graduate I shall have graduated by the end of this year.

Such complications notwithstanding, it remains the case that these morphemes have the same syntactic distribution as tense morphemes in IE languages, but are apparently without the assertion component associated with IE finite auxiliaries. It is to the expression of this component that we now turn. 3.2. Distribution and function of c: parallels with English do-support Setting aside its function as a morpho-syntactic host for tense and agreement something that is clearly irrelevant for Vietnamese English do-support is observed in five main contexts (or three, if negation and emphasis, and responsive and ellipsis Page 18

constructions, respectively, are interpreted as different reflexes of common underlying constructions):

(17)

a.i a.ii b.i b.ii. c.

do occurs (in construction with lexical verbs) in negative clauses. do occurs (in construction with lexical verbs) in emphatic clauses. do occurs (in construction with lexical verbs in responsives. do occurs (in construction with lexical verbs) in ellipsis constructions. do occurs (in construction with lexical verbs) in direct questions.

As we shall see directly, this way of describing English do-support characterizes almost perfectly the distribution of Vietnamese c , the only difference being the (phonetic) optionality of the latter in most contexts. When it
IS

realized, however,

Vietnamese c functions just like English do-support, except that obviously it doesnt support any bound morphology. Each of these contexts is presented in turn. 3.2.1. Negative Environments

The most common marker of lexical or sentential negation in Vietnamese is khng (except when it appears in final position, where it indicates a question); other negative elements with near-parallel distribution and function include (more literary) chang, cha (no, not) and cha (not yet). As the examples in (17) illustrate, in contexts of
CONSTITUENT NEGATION

khng must immediately precede whatever constituent it

modifies in order to be interpreted as a negator of that constituent. Compare especially (18c) and (18d), where the reversed scope of khng with respect to the adverbial hon ton radically alters the interpretation of the sentence:

Page 19

(18) a. Mon an nay

khng ngon.

meal eat DEM NEG tasty That dish is not tasty. b. Mon an nay ngon khng?

meal eat DEM tasty NEG Is that dish tasty? *That dish is not tasty. c. Co ay hoan toan khong tan thanh. approve

PRN DEM completely NEG She totally disapproved. d. Co ay

khong hoan toan tan thanh.

PRN DEM NEG completely approve She didnt totally approve.

The close relationship between the syntactic position of khng and its scopal interpretation is brought out clearly by the interpretation of indefinite subjects in (19): where immediately preceded by khng , the subject argument ai is necessarily interpreted as a polarity item (19a), otherwise it is treated as a WH-element (19b): cf. (2) above, see also Li (1992), Tsai (1994).10

(19) a. Khong ai thay anh. NEG AI see PRN No-one saw you.

Page 20

b. Ai khong thay anh? AI NEG see PRN Who didnt see you?

Given this rigid distribution for

CONSTITUENT

negation, it is interesting to see

where khng appears in cases of SENTENTIAL negation. As the examples in (20) make clear, khng obligatorily occurs immediately to the left of c: other positions either to the left of the tense element (20c), or to the right of c before or after the lexical verb (20d, e) are wholly ungrammatical: 11

(20) a. Hom qua anh

ay

khong co en nha ch.

yesterday PRN DEM ANT NEG CO go house PRN He didnt go to your house yesterday. b. Hom qua anh ay a co en nha ch khong?

yesterday PRN DEM ANT CO go house PRN NEG Did he go to your house yesterday? *He didnt go to your house yesterday? c. *Hom qua anh ay khong a co en nha ch. d. *Hom qua anh ay a co khong en nha ch. e. *Hom qua anh ay a co en khong nha ch.

This order is so fixed that, in colloquial spoken Vietnamese, khng and c are often treated as a fused element khng-c even though c is always optional in terms of phonetic realization, strictly speaking (Pham Hoa, personal communication).

Page 21

Now, given the parsimonious assumption that sentential negation is covered by the same generalization as applies to constituent negation, the distribution of khng in (20) provides prima facie evidence for one of the central claims of this paper, namely, that the assertion phrase headed by c, rather than the higher tense projection, is the head of the clause. This is diagrammed in (21); compare the structure in (11) above:12 5 T AsrP 1 4 (se/a) khng 4 Asr vP 1 4 [+NEG] 4 1 v co 3.2.2. Emphatic assertion contexts

(21)

In addition to negative contexts, c may optionally appear in any declarative clause. In this respect, it mirrors the use of do-support in earlier varieties of Standard English (including Early Modern English) and in some current non-standard varieties: see Ellegrd (1953); Visser (1963-1973); Warner (1993); also Schtze (2003). More typically, however, c is realized in emphatic contexts (in conjunction with khng, in negative emphatic contexts, and often also in conjunction with other emphatic particles such as m). This emphatic function is exemplified by the sentences in (22):

(22) a. Anh (khong) co mua sach! PRN NEG CO buy book

He DID (did NOT) buy the book!

Page 22

b. Ch (khong) co i lam! PRN NEG CO go work She IS (is NOT) going to work! c. Toi co I gi th mi ong ay ma! (N:153)

CO send letter invite PRN DEM EMPH

I DID send him an invitation. With respect to emphasis, c or rather, the syntactic projection hosting c shows two further parallels with do-support. The first of these interactions involves the multifunctional WH-element au. In post-verbal argument positions, the latter element is obligatorily interpreted as a locative expression (with verbs that select locative arguments). Elsewhere, however, au functions as an emphatic negative particle. In this latter function, au has a quite different distribution, appearing either preceding the assertion marker c , or in sentence-final position, following c or khng. Nguyen nh-Hoa (1990: 59) provides the examples in (23) below. Note that the order in (23a) and (23d) only permits the emphatic interpretation for au: in its interrogative function, au must always appear in a post-verbal argument position. Notice also that emphatic a u is always negative, even when khng is unexpressed, as in (23a) and (23b):13

(23) a. Ong au co

en!

PRN DAU CO come He did NOT show up! (*Where did he show up?)

Page 23

b. Ong co en au! PRN CO come DAU He did NOT show up!14 c. Ong khong en nha au!

PRN NEG come house DAU He is NOT going to your house! (*Where did he come to the house?)

d. Ba

au co

phai la

ngi Hanh-thien!

PRN DAU CO right COP person H.-T. She is NOT a native of Hanh Thien, I tell you!

The phonetic optionality of khng in contexts that are nevertheless obligatorily interpreted as negative suggests that emphatic au modifies, and is in construction with, a syntactic projection with negative features, rather than with a particular lexical item. This claim is diagrammed in (24): 5 T AsrP 1 4 (se/a) au 4 khng Asr vP 1 4 [+NEG] [+EMPH] [-WH] 1 (co)

(24)

Such an analysis is supported by the fact that preverbal a u and (sentential negation) khng are in complementary distribution, illustrated in (25) below. This indicates
EITHER

that they compete for the specifier position of this projection, as Page 24

shown in (24),

OR

that they are both head-adjoining adjuncts in the sense of Travis

(1988), attaching directly to the head of AsrP:

(25) a. Ong (*khong) au co en! PRN NEG DAU CO come

He did not show up! b. Ong (*au) khong co en! PRN DAU NEG CO come He did not show up!

The analysis in (25) is further supported by some other facts about emphatic stress in Vietnamese. Nguyen nh-Hoa (1990: 60) reports that, especially in womens speech, pre-verbal WH-elements have a negative function if they are heavily stressed. This is shown by the minimal contrast in (26):15

(26) a. AI noi. ai speak No-one spoke. b. Ai noi? ai speak Who spoke?

On closer examination, however, an alternative generalization here is that, for negative emphasis, stress is placed on the first overt element to the left of the verb,

Page 25

since either khng or c, rather than ai, attracts stress whenever either of these other elements are realized:

(27) a. Ai C noi! AI CO speak No-one spoke/Who did speak? b. Ai

KHNG

noi! speak

ai NEG

No-one spoke/Who did not speak? c. ?AI khng noi? d. ?AI c noi?

This distributional pattern finds immediate parallel with emphatic contexts involving do in English, where once again it is the element to the immediate left of the lexical verb that attracts emphatic stress:

(28) a. She DID say that! b. She did NOT say that! c. She did SO say that! (*She DID so say that!) d. She did TOO say that! (*She DID too say that!)

In both English and Vietnamese, the distribution of emphatic stress can be captured by the structural analysis in (24), where stress falls on the first phonetically realized element to the left of the head of AsrP, if the head itself is not realized. On this analysis, the only syntactic difference between English and Vietnamese would be Page 26

that do raises to T to pick up Tense and Agreement features, whereas c remains in situ. This difference is diagrammed in (29): 5 T AsrP 1 4 VN. a khng 4 Eng. didj not Asr vP 1 4 [+NEG] [+EMPH] [-WH] 1 VN. co Eng. tj

(29)

As discussed in section 4.1 below, this analysis is essentially a minor revision of Chomskys original (1957) proposal for handling emphatic assertion.16 3.2.3. Default Past Tense reading The claim that c is a pure assertion marker immediately accounts for an additional property of c mentioned in more several traditional sources namely, what may be termed its default past tense reading. Ngo Nh Bnh, for example, notes explicitly that c tends to be used to emphasize the fact that an action definitely takes/took place... (Ngo Nh Bnh 1999: 176). Since one is generally only sure about asserting past events, and since the optional tense markers se and a are nearly always omitted in the spoken language, it is natural that the default interpretation of assertion c is as a past tense marker since both pick out Topic Time in different ways.17

Page 27

This is further evidenced by the fact that Vietnamese speakers often translate sentences containing c using English past tenses (unless another temporal reading is forced by the context, or by the presence of an overt future morpheme). This default past property of c forms part of the explanation of the instances of scope evasion presented in section five below. Notice that these two properties of c its association with specific Topic Times and its default past tense interpretation highlight the special sense of assertion proposed in K. (1998): assertion does not simply mean the speakers support for a particular proposition otherwise c could as well be used with generic statements rather, it involves the linking of propositional material (K.s INF*) to a particular Topic Time. 3.2.4. Vietnamese responsive constructions

The next parallelism between Vietnamese c and English do involves constraints on responsive constructions. In common with many other languages, Vietnamese has no specific words directly corresponding to English Yes and No. Rather, Vietnamese speakers give assent to a prior Yes-No-question either by responding with c or by repeating the predicate; speakers show dissent either by responding with khng (c) (or again, with khng plus the repeated predicate). This is illustrated in (30):

Page 28

(30)

Anh (co) mua sach khong? PRN (CO) buy book NEG Did you buy the book? a. Co Yes, I did!

b. Khong (co)! No, I didnt!

What is of interest here are the constraints determining whether speakers employ khng (c) or choose to repeat the predicate: it is these that would appear to expose c as a pure assertion marker in K.s sense. Consider first the typical question-answer pairs in (31a) and (31b), involving an active and a stative predicate, respectively. (31) a. Ch Phng co mua nha Phuong khong?

CO buy house NEG

'Did Phuong buy a house?' A: Da, co! (10/10) b. Co ay (co) ep khong? A:??Da, mua! (02/10)

PRN DEM (CO) beautiful NEG 'Is she beautiful?' A:??Da, co! (03/10) A: Da, ep! (08/10)

In principle, a speaker can assent to the question involving the active predicate in (31a) either by repeating the predicate or by using c; however, the latter is clearly preferred where the question is interpreted as asking about a specific past event (see below). In (31b), by contrast, the judgment is reversed: in response to the question

Page 29

about an individual-level property is she beautiful? the preferred response is ep (beautiful) rather than c.

(32) a. Ch (co) ban khong? PRN CO busy NEG Are you busy? A: ?Da, co! (16/20) b. Ong (co) nh toi khong? A: Da, ban! (18/20)

PRN DEM remember I NEG Do you remember me? A: ?Da co! c. Em (co) hieu khong? A: Nh ch!

PRN CO understand NEG Do you understand? A: ?Da co! (14/21) d. Anh am co li khong? A: Da, hieu! (21/21)

PRN Dam CO lazy khong Is Dam lazy? A: ??Da, co! (03/10) A: Da, li! (09/10)

As is further illustrated by the sentences in (32), this contrast is representative of a more general split between typical uses of active vs. stative predicates, with active predicates preferring c in the responsive clause, and statives preferring repetition of the predicate in question. (These examples also indicate that it is more common to Page 30

omit c in the question if a stative predicate is involved, a point we will return to directly).18 However, non -typical uses such as those in (33)-(35) show that the correlation between predicate-type and responsive is not necessary, and that the assertion property of c is actually independent of predicate-type. So, in the generic questions in (33), which make no reference to specific events, the preferred responsive is predicate repetition (even though an active predicate is involved). This pattern minimally contrasts with the sentences in (34): there, a specific event is referred to, and c is once again strongly preferred over predicate repetition.

(33) a. Ngi Nhat (co) an ca khong? person Japan CO eat fish NEG Do Japanese people eat fish? A: ?Da, co. b. Anh (co) sa may.anh khong? NEG A: Da, an.

PRN CO repair camera Do you repair cameras? A: ?Da, co!

A: Da, sa. anh ngi Nhat o co an ca khong?

(34) a. Tuan roi trong nha hang cua last week in

restaurant POSS PRN people Japanese CO eat fish NEG

Last week in your restaurant did Japanese people eat fish? A: Da, co. A: *Da, an.

Page 31

b. Hom qua khi

may.anh cua chung toi b I

h,

anh co sa khong?

Yesterday when camera POSS PL

PASS break, PRN CO fix NEG

Yesterday when our cameras broke did you fix the cameras? A: Da, co. c. Bay gi anh co now hoc khong? A: *Da, sa.

PRN CO study NEG

Are you studying now? A: Da, co ! (20/22) A:??Da, hoc! (09/22)

Conversely in (35), typically stative predicates such as vui ve (cheerful) and t tin (confident), which normally require repetition in the responsive clause, prefer c as a response when embedded under a raising predicate such as trng (appear) that refers to a specific time.

(35) a. Ho co

trong

vui ve

khong?

PRN CO appear cheerful khong Did they appear cheerful? A: Da, co. (10/16) A:??Da, vui ve (07/16)

Page 32

b. Ho co

trong t tin

khong?

PRN CO seem confident khong Did they seem confident? A: Da, co. A;?Da, t tin

To capture this set of contrasts across the two predicate types, the best generalization seems to be that c is used to associate a predicate with a Topic Time where there is one: that is to say, it is a pure assertion marker in K.s sense. Where there is no relevant Topic Time, as in typical stative clauses and with active predicates in generic contexts, c is dispreferred.19 3.2.5. Ellipsis Contexts

Just as c mirrors the assertion component of English do in responsives, so it also functions like do in ellipsis contexts more generally. This is of course to be expected if responsives are simply a special case of VP-ellipsis; nevertheless, it is still of interest given that VP-ellipsis is often treated as a language-particular property peculiar to English do. Consider the examples in (36), showing ellipsis of the verb in affirmative and negative contexts, respectively.

(36) a. Anh khong co mua xe, nhng ho PRN NEG CO buy car, but

co.

PRN co

He didnt buy a car, but they did. b. Cau Charles co mua mu mi, nhng toi khong. PRN Charles CO buy hat new, but I khong

Charles bought a new hat, but I didnt. Page 33

c. Chng ti c lm bi PL

nhng ho

khng.

I CO do homework but

PRN NEG.

We did our homework, but they didn't.'

The main point to observe here if the analysis proposed in (29) is correct is that English and Vietnamese differ with respect to the strong head licensing VPellipsis (in the sense of Lobeck (1995): in English, it is Tense or strong Negation, whereas in Vietnamese, only Assertion licenses ellipsis. This difference is

diagrammed in (37), where Neg is construed as one value of AsrP: English ellipsis head (affirmative contexts) (37) 5 T AsrP 1 4 VN ellipsis head VN. a khng 4 Eng. didj not Asr vP 1 4 [+NEG] [+EMPH] [-WH] 1 VN. co Eng. tj

That Vietnamese T is not strong enough to license ellipsis is evidenced by the ungrammaticality of the examples in (38); here, neither a nor se can support ellipsis:

Page 34

(38) a. *Anh a

khong mua xe, nhng ho

se

PRN ANT khong buy car, but

PRN FUT

He didnt buy a car, but they will. b. *Cau Charles a khong mua mu mi, nhng toi a. PRN Charles ANT khong buy hat new, but Charles didnt buy a new hat, but I did. I ANT

It seems reasonable to think that this difference is related to the claim, expressed in (29), that the morpheme carrying assertion moves to T in English, but remains in situ in Vietnamese: the common generalization would then be that VP-ellipsis is licensed by whatever head hosts assertion features at Spell-Out.20 3.2.6. Question formation The last obvious parallelism between English do-support and Vietnamese c is observed in Yes-No questions. As has already been shown, Vietnamese Y-N questions are formed using c plus the negation element khng in sentence-final position. As in the other contexts, c need not always be overtly realized; I assume, however, that the corresponding syntactic projection is always expressed.21

(39) a. Anh (co) mua sach khong? PRN CO buy book khong Did you buy the book? b. Chieu nay ch (co) i lam khong?

evening DEM PRN CO go work khong Are you going to work this evening? Page 35

c. Anh ay

co phai la

ngi viet khong?

PRN DEM CO right COP person viet khong Is that person Vietnamese?

In analysing these interrogative constructions, two related questions arise: namely, the proper analysis of c and that of sentence-final khng. Whether the presence and position of c in Vietnamese Yes-No questions is surprising or predictable depends on one's basic assumptions about the syntax of question formation more generally. It is surprising if one adopts the (currently standard) assumption that WH-features are an inherent property of the highest functional projection of the clause, namely CP. On this view, in English question-formation the movement of do from T to C to pick up or check features is accidental, and essentially unrelated to the base-position of wh-features. Such an assumption is supported by languages such as Modern Irish, as exemplified in (40), where the presence of an overt +WH morpheme already in C appears to preclude any similar T-C movement. If, universally, +WH features are an inherent property of CP, one would expect Vietnamese to show a morphological reflex of such features in a much higher position than that occupied by c.

(40) a. A-r

ith s

an

t-ll?

Q-PAST eat PRN DET apple Did he eat the apple? b. An bhfuil Cit anseo? Q BE C. here

'Is Cit here?'

Page 36

Conversely, if one construes assertion as one of a broader set of modality features as K. and others have proposed (see above) then the occurrence of c in this medial position in Y-N-questions is completely natural. Notice that since Chomsky's (1957) proposal, a series of generative analyses have treated WH as an underlying INFL feature, rather than an inherent property of C. Such a view is expressed in work by Rizzi (1990, 1996), Haegeman & Zanuttini (1991); see also Haegeman (1995), and especially Laka (1990). Here, I develop a revised version of Rizzis (1996) proposal that [wh] features are base-generated in INFL and only subsequently moved to C; see Noonan (1989) for a related idea, see also Aoun & Li (1993). For Rizzi, morpho-syntax provides the motivation for this claim: referring to work by Chung (1982), Clements (1984), Georgopoulos (1985) and Hak (1990), among others, Rizzi notes that several languages exhibit special verbal morphology for interrogatives. By locating +WH features in the main inflection (Rizzi 1996: 66), Rizzi accounts for the distribution of this morphology and provides formal motivation for I-to-C movement, as well as for its restriction to root clauses (by hypothesis, lexically-selected C nodes have inherent WH features, and thus do not need to inherit them through movement). Rizzis (1996) analysis comes close to the same structural association between assertion and modality (more broadly construed) as the one advanced here. He writes:

It is natural to assume that such a position [for +wh features] can be the main inflection (or one of the main inflectional heads, if some version of the Split Infl hypothesis is adopted, as in Pollock (1989)),
THE HEAD THAT ALSO

CONTAINS THE INDEPENDENT TENSE SPECIFICATION OF THE WHOLE SENTENCE.

Page 37

I would like to propose that among the other autonomously licensed specifications, the main inflection can also be specified as [+WH ] (Rizzi 1996: 66, emphasis mine: NGD)

While endorsing Rizzis general proposal that WH features are generated in a sentence-medial position, I suggest that the more specific claim namely, that the WH feature is associated with the
TENSE

projection is incorrect. Instead, the

Vietnamese facts, where features of assertion, emphasis and modality are systematically dissociated from tense features, all suggest an analysis that places WH features one projection LOWER (in AsrP): 5 T AsrP 4 4 Asr vP 1 4 [NEG] [EMPH] [WH] 1 VN. co Eng. tj

(41)

That modality features, including WH features, are dissociated from Tense is generally obscured in less isolating languages by the fact of verb-movement; in Vietnamese, by contrast, the two always remain separate. If this is the correct analysis of the position of c in Vietnamese interrogatives, the remaining issue is the proper treatment of sentence-final khng . Three analyses suggest themselves immediately: first, that khng is a sentential tag, roughly equivalent to English isnt it/she/etc; second, that khng is in the head of a rightward

Page 38

C; finally, that khng is right-adjoined to vP within the syntactic scope of +WH c. These options are schematized in (42) below:

(42) a. [[ .........TP........], khng ]

b.

CP 5 TP C 4 1 T khng 3 T AsrP 5 T AsrP 4 4 Asr vP 1 4 [-NEG] [EMPH] [+WH] 1 VN. co Eng. tj

c.

There are several reasons to reject the former alternatives and to adopt the third (42c). With respect to the tag analysis, two points should be noted. First, in Vietnamese Y-N questions, khng fails to show the comma intonation pattern typical of sentential tags; instead, it is fully prosodically integrated into the v P. More significantly perhaps, Vietnamese has an alternative tag strategy for forming Y-N questions: this latter strategy, illustrated in (43) below, employs exclusively positive rather than negative tags, and displays exactly the expected intonational pattern. Taken together, these facts cast doubt on the idea that bare sentence-final khng should be analyzed as a sentence-tag.

Page 39

(43) a. Anh ay

khong (co) en, (co) phai khong? CO come, CO right NEG

PRN DEM NEG

He didnt come, did he?

The rightward complementizer analysis in (42b) is somewhat harder to reject, based as it is on a treatment by Cheng (1997) of similar sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese. However, whereas this analysis is plausible for Mandarin, other facts distinguishing the two languages suggest that it is not directly transferable to Vietnamese. The first is a narrow typological fact: in contrast to Mandarin, which displays more mixed word-order properties, Vietnamese is otherwise strictly headinitial; if khng were analyzed as occupying a rightward C position, it would be the only syntactic head in the language projected to the right of its phrasal complement.22 More importantly, and again in contrast to Mandarin, Vietnamese has what appear to be LEFTWARD complementizers in other syntactic environments. This set includes the -WH complementizer rang in (44a) and the +WH complementizer neu in (44b), corresponding to English that and if , respectively. Assuming that these latter elements are indeed complementizers in C, the case for sentence-final khng as a rightward complementizer would appear to be further reduced.

(44) a. Anh a noi (rang) co ta khong tin

*(rang)

PRN ANT say (that) PRN khong believe (that) He said that she didnt believe (him).

Page 40

b. (Neu) ngi ta mang hang-hoa en tan nha *(neu), ... (if) people bring goods go visit house (if)

If people bring goods to your house...

The alternative analysis proposed here is that given in (43c): sentence-final khng is right-adjoined to vP, and derives its interpretation in virtue of being in the syntactic scope of the assertion head specified with +WH features (the head that is optionally phonetically realized by c). 3.3. Interim summary The Vietnamese data presented in the preceding sections illustrate the strong formal and functional parallelism between Vietnamese c and English do-support: all of the functions served by one are served by the other, with the obvious exception that English do hosts inflection, whereas c does not. The functional parallelism supports the claim, made earlier, that English do-support does much more than rescue stranded affixes it is no mere dummy or pleonastic element and that it is a reflex of a much more general syntactic means of expressing assertion and related modality features. As important as the functional parallelism, however, are the formal distributional parallels: the position of c in Vietnamese clauses sentence-medial and syntactically separated from tense provides evidence for an independentlyprojected assertion (modality) head rather low in the functional structure of the clause. The evidence laid out above, from the position of sentential negation and of emphatic negative and assertive modifiers, as well as the from the ellipsis and responsive systems, all points to this head (AsrP) as the head of the clause, at least in

Page 41

Vietnamese. The analysis diagrammed in (29) above shows that such an analysis may also be applied to English, modulo the effects of verb movement. Moreover, the additional interpretive facts that have been presented, in particular, the default past interpretation of c , and the typical interactions between the realization of c in responsives and the type of lexical predicate involved, suggest that the features of this head are intimately bound up with the syntax of what is termed event representation in other formal analyses. I suggest that it is not coincidental that AsrP occupies precisely the hierarchical position at which other researchers have postulated some type of Event Phrase: see Travis (1994, 2000), Ritter and Rosen (2000), and other contributors to Tenny & Pustejovsky (2000), amongst others; see also Davidson (1967); Parsons (1990); and Kratzer (1996). Note that the main difference between many of these accounts and that proposed here is that in the former the head of the phrase typically serves to express an event, and is thus dependent on the lexical semantics of the predicate, whereas on the present analysis c serves to assert a Topic Time, which need not in principle make reference to any specific EVENT: it could as well refer to a STATE at a particular time, as in (35). Both syntactically and semantically, then, Vietnamese c and English auxiliary do show rather striking parallels in those contexts where they share the clause with another predicate. In fact, the only obvious point of divergence between these two functional elements aside from morpho-syntactic support is in their interpretation as main predicates: as a lexical predicate, Vietnamese c is translated as have, possessor be in existential contexts (see below) rather than do. Even here, though, both elements belong to the class of light verbs; see Jespersen (1965); cf. Kearns (1989) and Grimshaw (1990).

Page 42

The data presented thus far therefore provide clear empirical support for Kleins proposal, that Assertion is syntactically expressed, and that it can, in principle, be dissociated from Tense: in Vietnamese, these two components of finiteness clearly separated, morphologically and syntactically. In addition to motivating a low functional projection for modality immediately above vP, the Vietnamese facts also provide evidence for the other leading idea in Klein (1988), namely, that constituents can be placed inside or outside the scope of this assertion head, and that this has immediate consequences for clausal interpretation. In section five below, this notion of scope is shown to account for the distribution and interpretation of several independent multifunctional elements in Vietnamese: the analyses presented there further reinforce the idea that the relevant scopal operator is projected in this low position below TP, and the subject position in [Spec, TP] rather than in the highest functional projection (CP). Before turning to these scope facts, however, it is worth drawing attention to the similarities between the structural analysis proposed here for c and Chomskys (1957) original analysis of the constructions involving do-support in English. Given the parallelisms that have been reviewed here, it should not be surprising that Chomskys analysis of do -support fits Vietnamese so well. The point here is that subsequent developments in generative theory have so tended to marginalize English do-support that such parallels in analysis become much less obvious. 4 Motivating Asr The general idea that assertion, negation and modality are closely associated syntactically is of course a classic notion in generative grammar: it pre-dates the split between generative vs. interpretive semantics, informing both traditions,23 and
ARE

Page 43

provides the conceptual basis for the GB distinction between lexical and functional categories, a distinction that drove nearly fifteen years of syntactic research.24 4.1. Chomsky (1957) In Syntactic Structures, negation, modality (question formation), and emphasis are analyzed in terms of three transformational rules: Tnot, Tq, and TA, respectively; cf. Katz & Postal (1964), Baker (1970). The first rule derives negative sentences by introducing the lexical item
NOT

into a position immediately to the right of the base

position of verbal affixes (anachronistically, following Infl). Given the extrinsic ordering of these rules, this results in the non-adjacency of Af and the main verb, which in turn triggers do-support (to carry the affixes). The question formation rule, Tq also operates on the affixal position, interchanging this with the first element of the sentence, that is, the subject. As with Tnot, this has the effect of triggering dosupport, since the subject now intervenes between the affix and its verbal host. Finally, to handle emphatic constructions, Chomsky:

set[s] up a morpheme A of contrastive stress to which the following morphophonemic rule applies: (45) ..V..+A --> "V, where " indicates extra heavy stress.

TA imposes the same structural analysis of strings as does Tnot and adds A to these strings in exactly the position where Tnot adds not or n't. (Chomsky 1957:65).

In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky was insistent that the three rules were intimately related: indeed, it was the feeding/bleeding relationship among them that provided the Page 44

motivation for a transformational approach. The quotation above relates the negation and emphasis transformations (Tnot and TA); a few paragraphs earlier, Chomsky explicitly relates Tnot and Tq:

The crucial fact about the question transformation Tq is that almost nothing must be added to the grammar in order to describe it. Since both the subdivision of the sentence that it imposes and the rule for appearance of do were required independently for negation, we need only describe the inversion effected by Tq in extending the grammar to account for yes-or-no questions. Putting it differently, transformational analysis brings out the fact that negatives and interrogatives have fundamentally the same structure (Chomsky 1957: 64-65).

There are several points to notice immediately about this analysis. First, though it provides a parallel treatment of negation and assertion, it is just that, parallel: given a strong transformational rule system (including ordered lexical insertion rules), it is essentially an accident, albeit a convenient one, that the two rules Tnot and TA happen to apply in the same structural context. Furthermore, the analysis treats as accidental the fact that the rule targets a functional category, as opposed, say, to a main verb. Second, unlike Tq, Tnot and TA do not in fact target any constituent directly; instead, they insert new material into space to the right of the Infl constituent (C, in Chomsky 1957). This property, taken in conjunction with the fact that it was obviously not a meaning-preserving operation, led to the abandonment of Tnot in later, more representational, versions of the theory, especially those that assumed Page 45

some version of the Projection Principle (Chomsky (1981). Once negation came to be viewed as necessarily a d-structure property, parallels with TA were lost: in subsequent treatments of do -support, emphatic do is either ignored entirely or relegated to a footnote; see, for example, Chomsky (1989). As a result, most of the extensive research on the NegP hypothesis following Pollock (1989) disregards the fact that the same position that modulates negation also modulates emphasis (or assertion). Laka (1990, 1994) and Haegeman (1995) are notable exceptions to this; however, these authors place the relevant functional head labeled " and [Pol] by Laka and Haegeman, respectively above, rather than below, Tense. Only much more recently, in Cormack & Smith (2002), has it been proposed for English that assertion and negation are united in a low functional head: the proposals made here for Vietnamese appear to be quite consistent with Cormack and Smiths analysis for English, except that the present proposal would also include WH-features in the same head.25 Of the three rules, only Tq is still considered a transformational operation: it is of course the direct precursor of T-C movement. What is interesting to observe, however, is that in Syntactic Structures the other two transformations were logically prior to Tq. As the quotation above makes clear, Tq is an extension to the

transformational system set up for Tnot and TA. Without such a system as importantly, without the associated extrinsic rule ordering Tq alone is insufficient to derive all the properties of yes-no questions. This is brought out forcefully by the sentences in (46), which involve both emphasis and T-C movement (small capitals indicates emphasis):

Page 46

(46)

She DIDNT say that whales were fish. a. Well, what DID she say, then? b. #Well, what did she SAY, then?

Ignoring (phrasal) wh-movement momentarily, it is relatively straightforward to derive (44a) under the (1957) analysis. First, the morpheme A is inserted. This interrupts the adjacency between Af and V, blocking Affix-hopping, and triggering do -support. TA Chomskys Rule (45) then applies, yielding emphatic do. Finally Tq is applied to the output of the other rules. Two points bear mention. First, the fact that examples (46a) and (46b) have distinct interpretations again suggests that the morpheme A of contrastive stress does more than affect the morpho-phonemics of the element it attaches to, correspondingly, that auxiliary do is more than simply a dummy host for stray affixes; if this were not so, (46a) and (46b) should be synonymous. Second, the derivation only works if the transformational rules are extrinsically ordered, since alternative orders of application yield the wrong results. Crucially, and perhaps unexpectedly, do-support must be triggered
BETWEEN

the insertion of the

morpheme A and the application of TA, and TA must precede Tq; otherwise, it is impossible for A to be carried along by Tq. This extrinsic ordering is contrary to Chomskys own proposal, which is for do-support to apply last (1957:63). Of course, this difficulty does not arise if Asr, negation and other modality features occupy the same distinguished base projection, and if the head of this projection is the initial target of English Aux-to-Comp; that is to say, if Aux-to-Comp is really Asr-TC, rather than T-C movement (in current terms), as proposed in (29) above.26 The fact that such an architecture is required to account for c and related markers of emphasis Page 47

and assertion in Vietnamese would seem to provide independent support for such a claim. 4.2 Additional Evidence for Low Modality: Vietnamese imperatives Vietnamese imperative constructions provide one further piece of evidence in favour of a low base position for modality features. As the examples in (47) from Ngo Nh Bnh (1999) illustrate, imperative morphemes are predominantly placed to the immediate left of the verb: where the subject is overtly realized, these morphemes always appear like c to the right of the subject. Note especially the ungrammaticality of the clause-initial placement that would be expected if imperatives occupied the left-peripheral CP projection (47d-f):27

(47) a. Cac anh

HAY

oc bai

nay.

PL PRN IMP read lesson this Read this text! b. Anh

C

hoi.

PRN IMP ask Go ahead. Ask. c. (Anh) NG noi to!

PRN NEG.IMP talk loud Dont speak loudly!

Page 48

d. *HAY cac anh oc bai nay. e. *C anh hoi. f. *NG anh noi to! 5 Scope and Scope Evasion The data presented thus far have provided evidence in support of the analysis of Vietnamese clause structure diagrammed in (11) repeated below for convenience in which modality features, including features of assertion, negation, emphasis and WH, are all associated with a sentence-medial, functional category projected below TP. By hypothesis, it is the features in the head of this projection that determine the interpretation of multifunctional elements in positions lower than this head: multifunctional elements placed features. (11) Top TOPIC 4 4 Top
1
ABOVE

AsrP are outside of the scope of these

th

4 1

TP

4 T AsrP se

FOCUS

4 ASR vP 1 4 c 4 v

If this analysis is correct, then multifunctional elements are expected to display two types of exceptional behavior: first, MFCS that would normally appear above AsrP in terms of argument structure specifically, subject arguments might be displaced so as to come within the scope of the Asr head; conversely, MFCS normally Page 49

projected to the right of Asr might raise to evade scope. As the following data shows, both of these predictions are borne out. 5.1. Multifunctional elements in subject position: moving INTO the scope of assertion The first context to consider is the clausal subject position, which falls outside of the scope of Asr, and where multifunctional elements nevertheless appear to receive varying interpretations. Some relevant cases are those in (48):

(48) a. Toi khong thay AI. I NEG see AI

I dont/didnt see anyone. b. Khong ai thay anh. NEG AI see PRN No-one sees/saw you. c. Ai khong thay anh? AI NEG see PRN

Who doesnt/didnt see you?

The sentences in (48) present two opposing challenges to the analysis developed thus far. Consider first the
MFCS

that are interpreted as negative polarity items, in

(48a) and (48b). The position of khng in (46a) is unproblematic if it is in [Spec, Asr], as assumed in (11). In (48b), however, khng DOES pose a problem since it appears to be in a pre-subject position; on the current analysis, khng should not have any negative force in this position, nor should it cause subject ai to be treated as a negative polarity item.

Page 50

However, things may not be as they seem. A consideration of Vietnamese existential clauses suggests an alternative analysis of (48b) that is perfectly consistent with the structure in (11). Given the discussion thus far, it should not be surprising that Vietnamese existentials are expressed using the multifunctional element c ; in this usage, c corresponds to the English copular be. Some examples are given in (48):

(49) a. Co tin-tc quan trong (ma) lam moi

ngi xuc dong.

CO news important REL make every person excited There is such important news as to make everyone excited. b. Khong co nhieu xe-la hoat-ong na. NEG CO much train operate more

Theres not much train travel anymore.

What is immediately relevant about these constructions is that, just as in English there -constructions, the subject (there-associate) obligatorily occurs in a lower position following c; this order contrasts directly with all the other cases we have seen involving a subject NP plus (emphatic or negative) c.28 If it is now assumed that c occupies the same position in all of these constructions, namely, under Asr, it allows for an alternative analysis for (48b) in which the subject ai occupies a position
LOWER

than the normal position of the

subject at Spell-Out, and where (negative) khng preceding this subject occupies [Spec, Asr], as shown in (50):29

Page 51

(50)

4 T AsrP 4 khng 4 Asr vP 1 3 [+NEG] ai thay anh [-EMPH] [-WH] 1 (c)

Such a re-analysis makes two straightforward predictions, both of which are borne out. First, c should optionally appear between (negative) khng and the subject ai, as in (51); by contrast, if khng were really an inherent constituent negation, negating ai in subject position, then c would appear in preverbal position FOLLOWING ai, as in the ungrammatical (51b).

(51) a. Khong co ai thay anh. NEG CO AI see PRN No-one saw you, there is no-one who saw you. b. *Khong ai co thay anh.

c. Khong co ai ma thay anh. d. Khong co co gai thong-minh nao NEG co PRN girl smart lay ngi co ta khong phuc.

which take person PRN DEM NEG admire

No smart girl gets married to a man whom she doesn't admire.

On the analysis in (50), sentences such as (48b) are really covert existentials, parallel to those in (49). As such, the second prediction is that the clausal material following the NP ai should be analyzed as a relative clause, with a phonetically empty subject. This latter prediction is borne out by the fact that (48b) is understood as Page 52

wholly synonymous with (51c), in which the (optional) relative clause-marker m appears between the subject/associate ai and the predicate thay. Therefore, there is good reason to think that khng can be given a uniform treatment as an underspecified multifunctional item within the scope of Asr in its Specifier position even where khng apparently precedes indefinite subjects. The remaining, and opposing, challenge is (48a), where ai receives a +WH interpretation even though it is outside the scope of a Asr[+WH] head. Unlike the NPI case just discussed, there is no possibility here of analyzing these as post-verbal subjects; all of the available distributional evidence, including c and khng placement, indicates that in this example ai occupies the canonical subject position [Spec, T], above Asr. Here, the most reasonable alternative analysis is that the +WH feature of Asr itself raises (covertly) to C, functioning as a +WH operator in C, and thus restoring the scope configuration required to license a +WH subject. This analysis, diagrammed in (52) below, is entirely consistent with standard treatments of wh-movement in WH-in situ languages. CP 4 C TP [+WH] 4 ai 4 T AsrP 4 khng 4 Asr vP 1 4 [+NEG] ai thay anh [-EMPH] [+WH] 1 (co)

(52)

Page 53

If these proposals are correct, then the appearance of multifunctional elements apparently in subject position does not constitute a real challenge to the main idea behind (11), namely, that the interpretation of preverbal multifunctional elements including c , ai g , a u , and khng (chang) is determined exclusively by their scopal relationship to the syntactic head Asr, and by the values of the feature-set of Asr. Rather than considering these elements massively ambiguous, the present proposal makes it possible to reduce their lexical specifications to a minimum, explaining their ambiguity directly in terms of their distribution. For example, ai interpreted variously as who, no-one and anyone, may be minimally specified with a single lexical feature [PERSON]; au (where, nowhere, anywhere, at all) might be specified as [LOCATION], assuming that at all is a covert locative; see footnote 13 above. The most significant reduction is offered for c , which as we have seen, is variously interpreted as an emphatic, negative, interrogative, and existential marker, and to express possession (have). Given the present proposal, c can be minimally specified as the lightest of light verbs, a pure assertion marker. As was already noted in the introduction, it is not original to claim that MFCs are lexically underspecified, or that they owe their interpretation to the features of some c-commanding operator: these ideas have already been articulated and developed by linguists working on Chinese, especially Li (1992), Tsai (1994) and Cheng (1997); also Aoun & Li (1993). However, as should be clear from the preceding sections, Vietnamese provides something extra: on the one hand, a clearer distinction between Tense and Assertion; on the other, clearer evidence for a very low position for the Assertion operator.

Page 54

5.2. Evading Scope Having considered the case where an element is exceptionally moved into the scope of Asr, we turn finally to examine two contexts, previewed in the introduction, where multifunctional elements are moved leftward from their canonical position to evade the scope of a particular head. Note that this movement is different from standard instances of scope-related movement QR, and the like in that the movement is not driven by a property of the raised constituent, but by properties of the configuration it is moving out of: here, an element is moving, not to check formal features or to TAKE scope, but to EVADE it. 5.2.1. Universal readings The most striking case of scope evasion is provided by the multifunctional elements ai, g, and no (which, any), when functioning as universal quantifiers. As the preceding sections have shown, these elements are construed in other contexts either as negative polarity items when in the scope of Asr[+NEG], or as [+W H ] variables in the scope of a WH-operator (in C, by 51)). In conjunction with the morpheme cung, standardly translated as also, however, these elements are obligatorily interpreted as universal quantifiers. The examples in (53) below show ai, no in subject position, outside the scope of Asr (assuming the analysis in (11)): the examples (53a,b) show the interrogative function of ai, no, while those in (53c, d) show their universal function.30

(53) a. Ai biet ai

co ay

au?

know PRN DEM be where

Who knows where she is?

Page 55

b. Sinh-vien nao student

biet giao s ay.

which know teacher DEM

Which student knows that professor? c. Ai cung biet co ay au?

who also knows PRN DEM be where Everyone knows where she is. d. Sinh vien nao cung biet student giao s ay.

which also know teacher DEM

Every student knows that professor.

At a morphological level, there are obvious parallels with some North East Asian languages, which also form universal expressions by combining WH-elements with a morpheme meaning also (compare, for example, Japanese dare-mo, Korean nookooto). This morphological parallelism might lead one to suppose that in Vietnamese ai cung forms a syntactic constituent also, contrary to the proposed analysis in (11). However, there is clear evidence that this is not the case. When positions other than the subject position are considered, a striking pattern is observed: if any argument other than the subject is expressed with universal ai, g, no, etc., then that argument must be fronted to a position preceding the Asr head, typically preceding the subject. In such cases, cu n g remains in the same immediately pre-verbal position. The examples in (53), from Ngo Nh Bnh (1999), illustrate fronting of direct objects and temporal adjuncts. What is of interest here is that the quantified expression must not be left in its canonical object position, nor in any position following preverbal cung, as evidenced by the ungrammaticality of the sentences in (55):31 Page 56

(54) a. T

nao

anh

ay

cung nh.

word which PRN DEM also remember He remembers every word. b. Ai co ay cung quen. also know

ai PRN DEM

She knows everybody. c. Bao gi anh ay cung en muon.

what time PRN DEM also come late He is always late. d. Ngay nao day which toi cung tap the thao. I also practise exercise

I do exercises every day.

(55) a. *Anh ay cung nh t nao. b. *Co ay cung quen ai. c. *Anh ay cung en muon bao gi. d. *Toi cung tap the thao ngay nao.

Prima facie, the ungrammaticality of the examples in (55) could be taken as a sign that Quantifier Raising (QR) in the sense of May (1977, 1985), and subsequent work is an obligatorily overt operation in Vietnamese. If this were correct, these examples would not speak directly to the issue of scope evasion, whatever their interest might be from the point of view of comparative syntax. However, an examination of
INHERENTLY SPECIFIED

universal quantifiers shows that overt QR is Page 57

not obligatory in Vietnamese. If underspecified elements such as ai and no are replaced with the inherently specified moi (every), as in the examples in (56), no such movement is observed; indeed, cung may not even co-occur with such elements. In other words, fronting is exclusively restricted to underspecified elements whose canonical position is below Asr.

(56) a. Ai cung nh

moi

t.

ai also remember every word Everyone remembers every word. b. Vai thay-giao biet moi sinh vien.

Some teachers know every student Some teachers know every student. c. Vai co gai cung tap the thao moi ngay.

some PRN girl also practise exercise every day Some girls also do exercises every day.

The notion of scope evasion permits a reasonably direct explanation of this restriction. On the analysis in (11), underspecified elements within the scope of Asr must receive one of three interpretations depending on the values of the feature-set of Asr: in the case of ai, for example, different specifications of Asr yield who [+WH], no-one [+NEG] and the indefinite someone [-NEG, -WH]. If these interpretations are obligatory
WITHIN

the scope of Asr, then the only way for these elements function as

universal quantifiers is if they are moved to a syntactic position beyond the scope of Asr. I suggest that this is what obtains here: that underspecified elements are fronted in order to avoid an unwanted interpretation.32 Page 58

Finally, consider the position of fronted objects and adjuncts in the grammatical sentences in (57): in contrast to the pre-subject position in the sentences in (54), these examples show that MFCS may be fronted to a position immediately following the subject position, but still preceding and outside the scope of the assertion head.33 Note that Vietnamese is generally a rigidly configurational language: other than the very free movement of topicalized constituents to the designated clauseinitial topic position, there is no scrambling in Vietnamese, so that in contrast to the MFCS in (57) inherently specified objects must not be placed in this position.

(57) a. Anh ay

nao

cung nh.

PRN DEM word which also remember He remembers every word. b. Co ay ai cung quen.

PRN DEM ai also know She knows everybody.

The sentences in (57) thus provide further confirmation for the claim that the active syntactic head (Asr) occupies a comparatively low position in Vietnamese phrase-structure: if TP, rather than AsrP, were the head to be evaded, these MFCs could only be adjoined in the higher clause-initial position (53) in order to be interpreted as universal quantifiers. 5.2.2. Tense alternations As already prefaced in the introduction, the second instance of apparent scope evasion in Vietnamese is observed with certain +WH temporal adjuncts (bao gi, luc

Page 59

nao, khi nao); that is to say, with expressions corresponding to English when, what time, etc. In Vietnamese, such expressions occur in one of two syntactic positions: following v P-internal arguments and clause-initially. In both positions, the

expressions mean when. There is a crucial interpretive distinction, however: in initial position, bao gi is obligatorily interpreted with future time reference, whereas in its (more canonical) sentence-final position, bao gi is interpreted as referring to past time. This minimal contrast is illustrated in (58):

(58) a. Bao gi co ay when

i My?

PRN DEM go America

When will she go to America? b. Co ay i My bao gi?

PRN DEM go America when When did she leave for America? c. Luc nao anh xem cuon phim o? when PRN watch CLS film DEM

When will you watch that film? d. Anh xem cuon phim o PRN watch CLS film DEM luc nao? when

When did you watch that film?

This pattern is noted in all standard Vietnamese reference texts and teaching guides.34 This temporal contrast is apparently grammatical, as opposed to being a (pragmatically determined) preference rule however that might be described. This

Page 60

is made clear by the fact that each order is compatible with only one or other tense morpheme, whenever these are explicitly realized: clause-initial temporal expressions are incompatible with the pre-verbal past tense morpheme a, but possible with the future morpheme se; the opposite judgments hold of the same expressions in clausefinal position. Compare (58) with the examples in (59) below.

(59) a. *Bao gi co ay when

i My?

PRN DEM ANT go America (07/25)

When did she go to America? b. Bao gi co when ay se i My?

PRN DEM FUT go America (25/25)

When will she go to America? c. Co ay a i My bao gi?

PRN DEM ANT go America when When did she leave for America? d. *Co ay se i My bao gi? (21/25)

PRN DEM FUT go America when When will she leave for America? (07/25)

There are two points to stress here, related to the discussion of universal quantifiers in the previous section. First, this alternation is not a case of WH-movement in the usual sense: as we have seen repeatedly, Vietnamese is a WH-in situ language, and all of these examples are interpreted as direct questions, whether or not the temporal

Page 61

expression is fronted. In any case, it seems implausible that the presence or absence of +WH features per se should directly affect temporal interpretation.35 Second, the alternation rather, the restriction on temporal interpretations imposed by the alternation applies only to
UNDERSPECIFIED

temporal expressions

(MFCS): other [-WH] temporal adjuncts, those with inherent temporal specifications, may freely appear in either position, though the post-verbal position is typically preferred. Consider now how the notion of scope evasion might explain this alternation. It will be recalled from the discussion section that in unmarked affirmative contexts, the assertion marker c (in Asr) has a default past tense interpretation. This interpretive effect was analyzed as follows: c is a pure assertion marker; assertion, especially emphatic assertion, is only generally felicitous if what is being asserted has already taken place; therefore, asserted events are understood as past events. If, as claimed above, c is just the lexical realization of Asr, then we may reformulate the previous sentence in terms of scope: elements within the scope of Asr (where Asr has the appropriate features) are interpreted as being asserted by the speaker. This offers an explanation for the different temporal interpretations of Vietnamese when-expressions (bao gi, luc nao, etc.), depending on whether or not they are within the scope of Asr: if bao gi is within the scope of Asr, the associated event is asserted, therefore interpreted as past, if bao gi is outside the scope of Asr, there is no assertion that the event actually took place; hence, a future reading is possible. This is schematized in (60):

Page 62

(60)

5 bao gi (FUTURE) TP 4 4 T AsrP 4 4 Asr vP 1 1 p [-NEG] vP bao gi [-EMPH] # (PAST) [+WH]

In other words, we account for the non-past reading of fronted bao gi in the same way as Klein accounted for the non-contribution of fronted temporal adverbials in (10) repeated below: in terms of scope evasion:

(10) a. John has been dead for two weeks. b. ?For two weeks, John has been dead.

If the temporal interpretation effect observed in such cases were only a

PREFERENCE

rule, this explanation might suffice as just formulated. However, as the

examples in (59) demonstrated, the rule appears to be categorical: it cannot be overridden by the presence of overt temporal markers (se, a). This means that there is a true formal incompatibility between the temporal features of the tense markers and another formal feature associated directly or indirectly with the temporal expression bao gi. If the scope explanation is to be retained, and if we continue to treat bao gi as underspecified for tense, then this feature must be associated with Asr. However, the feature in question cannot be one of the three [WH , EMPH, NEG] that we have manipulated up to now, since all of the values of these features are fully compatible with a range of temporal interpretations in other contexts. I propose, therefore, that another feature, ASSERTED (ASR), forms part of the Page 63

feature-set of Asr.36 If we now assume that -Asr is formally incompatible with +PAST, and that pure assertion c is the expression of the formal feature +ASSERTED, then we simultaneously gain an account of three things. First, we can explain why +ASSERTED c is often interpreted as a past marker. Second, we account for the fact that the varying interpretations of bao gi are categorically distinguished by the scope of Asr; it is, in fact, the +ASSERTED value of Asr which determines the interpretation. More generally, this hypothesis offers a possible explanation for the fact that in other languages, namely, those in which the syntactic positions Asr and Tns are syntactically conflated (through verb-movement), assertion and tense also come to be semantically conflated in the notion we understand as finiteness, as Klein (1998, in press) claims. Since Vietnamese does not have overt verb movement, tense and assertion are kept syntactically, if not interpretively, distinct. 5.2.3. EPP Extensions Taken together, the two cases of scope evasion just presented lead to a final proposal, one that is much more speculative, but which may have wider consequences. This is that the original Extended Projected Principle (EPP) (Chomsky (1981, (1995b) should be understood as a case of scope evasion. Under this proposal, subjects move from vP-internal position to [Spec, TP], not to satisfy an abstract nonsemantic requirement (to check an EPP feature), but rather for interpretive reasons, namely, to evade the scope of +A. As to why a subject NP should need to evade +A, the answer is the same as for the temporal wh-element bao gi: in order (for their existence) not to be asserted.

Page 64

As is well-known from the semantics literature, a prototypical property of subject NPs, which distinguishes them from (most) objects, is that the existence (of their referents) is
PRESUPPOSED ,

rather than asserted; see, for example, Dowty (1991).

Following Diesing (1992), I assume that presupposed NPs must, by definition, be outside of the nuclear scope or domain of existential closure of the sentence. Diesings Mapping Hypothesis directly relates a semantic notion of nuclear scope to a syntactic projection: the maximal vP. The Mapping Hypothesis requires that material within the vP (at LF) is mapped into the nuclear scope, while material from TP is mapped into a restrictive clause. Since the subject in [Spec, TP] is outside of the domain of existential closure, it can be presupposed; indeed, it must be for Diesing (unless it undergoes subsequent lowering into [Spec, VP]). The present proposal can thus be viewed as a re-formulation of Diesings Mapping Hypothesis. Only two modifications are necessary to make it compatible with the other analyses in this paper. First, I assume that the boundary between the syntactic domain corresponding to the restrictive clause and the nuclear scope should be drawn just above vP, at Asr, the head containing the +ASSERTED feature.37 Second, I assume, that at least for Vietnamese, subsequent LF-lowering is blocked: any and all material above Asr is pre-supposed.38 This latter assumption serves to explain why Vietnamese existential clauses, such as those in (49) and (50) above, necessarily involve subjects in a position following the assertion head: if LF-lowering were possible, no such restriction would be expected. 6 Conclusion The Vietnamese data presented in this paper have been shown to provide some relevant empirical support for two theoretical claims articulated in Klein (1998, in press): first, that finiteness should be understood as a composite of tense and Page 65

assertion, and that assertion may be syntactically realized independently of tense marking; second, that the assertion operator so realized has only partial scope over elements of the clause, so that fronted elements may evade this scopal influence. Vietnamese is of particular interest because it expresses assertion in a way that is unambiguously independent of tense or aspect marking. In this respect, it differs from most Indo-European languages (including English) where tense and assertion is conflated in finite inflection. It has been suggested here that this conflation is the result of obligatory verb- or auxiliary-movement from (V >) Asr > T in these languages. Vietnamese also differs from other isolating East Asian languages: although it shares many of the properties of Chinese varieties in terms of the interpretation of underspecified multifunctional categories, no Chinese variety shows the same clear differentiation of tense and assertion features in Infl as that exhibited by Vietnamese. The second contribution of the paper is the claim that assertion (and modality more generally) is syntactically projected in a low functional projection, immediately above the thematic/lexical vP. The claim opposes most recent theoretical assumptions about the base position of such features, which would place these in the highest functional projection of the clause (CP). I have argued that, at least for Vietnamese, this low position (rather than the higher Tense head) constitutes the syntactic head of the clause. Related to this claim, the formal and functional parallelisms between Vietnamese assertion markers especially c and English do-support suggest that the latter is not a language-specific mechanism, but the reflex of a more universal rule. Here, the Vietnamese data show more clearly than the original English data that do-support

Page 66

does much more than support inflection; in fact, its morpho-syntactic function is shown to be largely incidental.

* Acknowledgements. I should like to thank the following for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper: Jrgen Bohnemeyer, Ingrid Leung, Wolfgang Klein, Ayumi Matsuo, Tuong Hung Nguyen, Hoa Pham, Jeanne Tieu, and Thuan Tran. For important revisions to the final version, I am especially indebted to Tue Trinh, as well as two anonymous reviewers. I also thank the audiences at various presentations of this material in Leiden and Nijmegen, especially Lisa Cheng, Gertjan Postma, Rint Sybesma and Dylan Tsai. Naturally, I am solely responsible for all remaining errors of presentation or analysis. I also wish to express my gratitude to Wolfgang Klein and Stephen Levinson (Max Planck Institute), and to Pieter Muysken (University of Nijmegen) for providing me with such excellent research facilities during my time in Nijmegen. The initial phase of this research was initially funded by an award from the Government of Qubec (FCAR 98NC-1759), and latterly by an award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The research reported here is part of an ongoing grammar project on Vietnamese, previously based at McGill University, now at the University of Sheffield. For details, see http://www.shef.ac.uk/vietnamese/index.html.
1

A reviewer points out that this claim challenges not only standard formal

assumptions, but also has consequences for functional theories such as Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & La Polla (1997), which take illocutionary force as the highest operator on the clause level.
2

The

GENERAL

notion of multifunctionality is a wholly traditional one: it is

commonplace in natural languages that a subset of lexical items shows ambiguities in Page 67

different syntactic contexts. An example of this type of ambiguity is offered by English to, which functions variously as a dative marker, as a directional preposition, as a pure case marker, and as an infinitival morpheme. In such cases, the normal practice has been to treat ambiguity in terms of lexical polysemy. Thus, more traditional explanations of multifunctionality are essentially lexical, rather than syntactic, in nature. The
SPECIFIC, SYNTACTIC

notion of multifunctionality advanced

here is different from this general concept.

3

The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: ANT = (past) anterior

morpheme; CLS = classifier; COMP = complementizer; COP = copular verb; DEM = demonstrative; EMPH = emphatic morpheme; TOP = topic marker;; POL = politeness marker; Q = Q-marker; PRN = pronoun equivalent (typically family kinship term); REL = relative clause marker.
4

As Gertjan Postma (personal communication) points out, lexical verbs may bear

stress for what might be termed surprise intonation as opposed to contrastive intonation: thus, (i) is acceptable, whereas (ii) is less so: (i) They told me that it would work if I attached all the cables properly, I didnt believe them, but when I tried it, it (actually) WORKED! (ii) ?She said it wouldnt work even if I attached all the cables properly, I didnt believe them, but when I tried it, it WORKED!
5

One of the reviewers objects to the idea that imperatives can be tense-marked.

Whether or not that objection is justified, it is quite clear that this is indeed what K. is claiming. K. (1998) writes: TT is the time for which a claim is made. But not all utterances make a claim, and still they can be tense-marked. Questions are such a case, imperatives, especially in their negated form, are another one. Page 68

I interpret Kleins LINEAR notion of scope in terms of structural c-command, plus

[Spec, Head] Agreement. Given that Vietnamese is almost exclusively rightbranching,, treating scope as hierarchical rather than linear might seem to make little empirical difference to the final analysis. Importantly, however, it brings emphatic modifiers in [Spec, Asr] such as khng and au within the scope of the Asr head to their left. As always, it should be stressed that scope is a relational, rather than absolute, notion: the claim that a head takes scope over a particular domain should be understood as shorthand for the claim that a head takes scope over scopally-relevant elements (e.g., underspecified elements) within that domain.
7

For relevant supporting data, though with a very different analysis, see Cao Xuan

Hao (1991).
8

The numbers in parentheses beside many of the examples, indicate the acceptance

judgments of native-speaker consultants on on-line questionnaires, in which minimal contrasts, such as those in (14), were presented as pairs of sentences. Depending on the particular pair, either or both sentences could be accepted or rejected, and one could be preferred over the over.
9

This is a simplification of a more complex pattern. As discussed in Duffield (in

preparation), there is reason to think that these temporal elements may be distributed between TWO functional heads above Assertion Phrase: Tense, and Outer Aspect (in the sense of Travis (2000)). See also Duffield (forthcoming) for supporting

arguments for English. In the present context, the point is that these are purely temporal elements whether expressing tense or aspect that carry no assertive function (in contrast to their English equivalents). Page 69

10

I return to the analysis of the sentence in (17a) in section 5.1 below. Note that for many speakers, c is in complementary distribution with both se

11

and a even though they do not compete for the same position, as is shown by their placement relative to sentential negation; for other speakers consulted there is no complementarity between these two elements.
12

In (19), khng is analyzed as a specifier of AsrP, rather than an adjunct. Some

further support for this analysis will be presented directly (though, in fact, little hangs on this.)
13

It is tempting to see a parallel between this use of au and the English negative

modifier at all, German berhaupt, etc., which are also locative expressions, at least etymologically.
14

Thuan Tran (personal communication) points out that (22b) and (22c) are not in

fact identical in terms of their context of use: whereas (22a) emphatically negates the assertion that the event took place; (22b) expresses a negation of the proposition: here, the event may still be in the future (compare English Youre not going to show up, I tell you!)
15

This negative effect is analogous to the (negative) interpretation of rhetorical

exclamative questions in English, such as Who cares?!, Who gives a toss?! etc., albeit the pattern appears more productive in Vietnamese. Whether the effect is in any way restricted to womens speech is debatable (Tue Trinh, personal communication).
16

The analysis sketched in (28) offers a possible compromise in a long-standing

debate concerning the base-position of auxiliaries in English: between those who would analyze auxiliaries as main verbs (that undergo obligatory raising) such as Page 70

Ross (1969), McCawley (1971), Pullum & Wilson (1977) and others, including Emonds (1970), and Akmajian & Wasow (1976), who maintain that auxiliaries always start off outside the vP in a functional head. See Warner (1993) for relevant discussion.
17

This realis property of c has an apparent analogue in Chu & Chang 1987s

discussion of Mandarin le; see Klein, Li & Hendriks (2000).

18

This is comparable to the behaviour of do in English VP-anaphora (do so)

constructions, as discussed in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik (1972): 690). Quirk et al., citing the examples reproduced in (18), point out that do so is disfavoured with stative verbs of inert perception and cognition, such like, hate, think, but fully acceptable with what they term dynamic verbs: a. b.
19

?*A: Peter likes work. B: I think Bob does so too. ?*A: She will hate the way he goes on about his prizes. B: Peter will do so too. Tue Trinh (personal communication) suggests an alternative interpretation of this

asymmetry, namely that responsive c is used to confirm a fact objectively, whereas predicate repetition expresses the speakers subjective opinion on the matter at hand. This is quite compatible with the analysis presented here, objective facts typically being those associated with a specific event, and anchored to a particular Topic Time.
20

Precisely how this should be handled in Minimalist terms, where s-structure is

dispensed with, is a separate and much larger question. I take the Spell-Out constraint to be a satisfactory intermediate descriptive generalization.
21

C is optional with verbal and adjectival predicates, but obligatory with nominal

predicates, as in (38c).

Page 71

22

A potential counterexample to this assertion is the epistemic/alethic modal

element c , which also appears sentence-finally; see Duffield (1999) for an alternative treatment of this element.
23

See, for example, Fillmore (1968):

...there are probably good reasons for regarding negation, tense and mood as associated directly with the sentence as a whole, and the perfect and progressive 'aspects' as features on the V...See, for a statement, Lyons 1966.
24

This idea is in no way exclusive to formal approaches in which syntactic position

is an essentially hierarchical notion: it finds expression in more functionalist approaches in which syntax is regarded in more strictly linear terms. Especially relevant to the present work is the approach of Bisang (1992), whose development of the notion of attractor positions in South East Asian languages finds close parallels with the hierarchical positions discussed here. I am grateful to Jrgen Bohnemeyer for drawing my attention to Bisangs work. Given space constraints, however, I will restrict attention to generative accounts in this paper.
25

Cormack & Smith (2002)s paper came to my attention only after preparation of

this manuscript.
26

This is of course very similar to Pollock (1989)s treatment of Aux-to-Comp as

AGR-T-C. The crucial difference is that for Pollock, the lower functional projection was the non-interpretable AgrSP which came to be placed above Tense following Chomsky (1989), and which has subsequently been abandoned in mainstream Minimalist analyses. By contrast, here I am arguing for a strongly interpretable lower projection (Vietnamese provides even less motivation than English for any projection hosting uninterpretable agreement features.) Page 72

27

One of the reviewers points out that there is no complementary distribution

between the imperative morpheme and c, which might be expected if these competed for the Asr position of the same clause. This fact suggests a bi-clausal/raising analysis for Vietnamese imperatives: cf. English you are not to be seen in the area. Although this complicates the picture, it does not detract from the main claim, viz., that the imperative morpheme occupies a relatively low position in its own clause.
28

As Li, Charles & Thompson (1981) observe, a parallel restriction on indefinite

subjects in [Spec, TP] is observed in Mandarin Chinese; see also Cheng (1997). Cheng accounts for this restriction in terms of a formal Economy constraint restricting LF-lowering; in section 3.1 below, I argue for a more functionally-driven account in terms of scope evasion.
29

This analysis of existentials also raises issues concerning the role of the EPP in

Vietnamese, and more generally; see 5.4 for further discussion. Here, as throughout, I assume a version of the Internal Subject Hypothesis: in (50), the thematic subject MFC ai occupies the [Spec, v].
30

By convention, both direct and indirect questions in Vietnamese are indicated

with a question mark: the question mark in the indirect question in (51c) is due to the presence of interrogative au in the subordinate clause.
31

See Duffield (in preparation) for a discussion of similarities and contrasts

between Vietnamese cu n g and functionally related elements in Mandarin and Cantonese.

32

This proposal is related to, though distinct from, Fox (2000)s Economy

condition governing quantifier-raising. Fox suggests that QR applies only when it affects semantic interpretation: Page 73

(i) Economy condition on scope shifting (Scope Economy): OP [A set of operations] can apply only if it affects semantic interpretation (i.e., only if inverse scope and surface scope are semantically distinct). (Fox 2000: 23)
33

As noted in Cheng (1997: 141) this order is also observed in Mandarin Chinese. To my knowledge, this alternation is not observed in any other areally- or

34

typologically-related language: Mandarin and Cantonese show invariant (preverbal) word-order for such expressions; Thai also shows an invariant distribution; in Khmer, a past tense morpheme is attached directly to the wh-expression (again, with invariant word-order).
35

It seems that the constraint is not categorical for khi nao: consultants report the

following contrast in acceptability: i. Khi nao anh se when i?

PRN FUT go (19/20)

'When will you go?' ii. Anh se

i khi nao?

PRN FUT go when 'When will you go? (17/20)

I have no explanation for the absence of a categorical effect here.

36

This feature may correspond to what is understood in other frameworks as the

finiteness feature F. See for example, Clahsen, Eisenbeiss & Vainikka (1994).
37

Theoretically, this idea is somewhat more intuitive than Diesings construal:

unless a particular head is defined, the phrase material from IP most naturally includes any material dominated by IP, including the v P (nuclear scope). By rephrasing the Mapping Hypothesis in terms of a syntactic head Asr (with the relevant Page 74

semantic features), it is easier to correctly partition the sentence into restrictive clause and nuclear scope.
38

As indicated in footnote 20 above, a rather similar analysis of definiteness

restrictions in Mandarin Chinese is presented in Cheng (1997). One crucial difference between the two approaches is that by using the notion of scope evasion, the present account implements Diesings Mapping Hypothesis quite directly, rather than through the indirect use of purely formal features.

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