Syntax of Vietnamese Aspect

The aim of this thesis is two-fold: to develop an articulated Vietnamese clause structure in two syntactic domains: VP-external and VP-internal in the spirit of generative grammar, and to see how this functional architecture is supported empirically from the perspective of second language acquisition. To address theoretical issues, on the one hand, it brings together interesting semantic and syntactic contrasts of aspectual morphemes in Vietnamese, i.e., the distributional and interpretative independence of Vietnamese tense and aspect as well as the way they interact with other syntactic phenomenon such as negation, quantification and definiteness. On the other hand, it reveals to what extent the mechanisms that Vietnamese recruits to encode aspect are different from those employed in Indo- European languages and other areally-related languages, especially including Chinese. Based on a detailed semantic-syntactic investigation of Vietnamese aspect, the thesis sets out the properties that need to be acquired by Chinese learners. It distinguishes between those properties which are acquirable without difficulties and those that are ‘problematic’ in order to verify the proposed Vietnamese functional clause. It also sets out to validate some recent hypotheses in the realm of second language acquisition. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical approach of the thesis. Chapter 2 systematically reviews a set of semantic and syntactic studies on aspect that are relevant to the discussion. Chapter 3 lays out previous research on Vietnamese tense and aspect as points of departure for my proposals. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to an analysis of how tense and aspect are realized in Vietnamese both pre- and post-verbally. Chapter 6 provides a brief comparison between Vietnamese and Chinese aspectual systems, focusing on the particular properties investigated in the following chapter. Chapter 7 presents a set of experiments examining Chinese learners’ acquisition of Vietnamese aspect-related constructions, these shed light on current generativist hypotheses about second language acquisition. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis.