On nó as an optional expletive in Vietnamese

This chapter focuses on the use of the pronoun nó as an optional expletive in spoken Vietnamese, a radical pro-drop language. Having provided a detailed description of the distribution and interpretation of this element against the general background of the place of overt expletives in pro-drop languages, we argue that the expletive is inserted not to satisfy purely formal requirements, such as the EPP requirement, but rather to impose a specificity requirement on the eventive content of the clause. The present chapter shows that Vietnamese contributes to a better understanding of the nature of expletives and the conditions of their use cross-linguistically. This chapter also discusses the implications of our findings for the articulation of subject predicate structures and for the well-known distinction between thetic structures and categorical structures.