The Vietnamese Perfect: A Compositional Analysis

In this paper we have argued against previous analyses of Vietnamese perfect đã, which viewed the element as an atomic morpheme: we have shown that despite its morphological simplicity, perfect đã is semantically decomposable into two independent features, namely, an (aspectual) inchoative feature and a (temporal)anteriorfeature.Wehavefurtherclaimedthatthesetwofeaturesare independently projected in phrase structure in different head positions: in this way, the semantic composition of the Vietnamese perfect is directly related to itssyntacticstructure.Ourconclusionsarethusindicativeof afullytransparent semantics-syntax mapping in Vietnamese, in contrast to the semantics/syntax mismatches observed in some other languages, such as German (see Musan 2001).