Structure and Interpretation of the Left Periphery in Vietnamese

该项目旨在促进对左边缘的理论理解，包括例如自然语言中功能投射的库存和解释，以及它们作为普遍或特定语言的地位。为了后一个目的，该项目采用了跨语言的视角，通过观察一种孤立的语言，越南语（孟高棉语，南亚语），并将越南语的研究结果与研究得更好的印欧类型的屈折语言进行比较。这一探索也补充了对汉语的调查（部分不确定），汉语是另一种孤立的语言，但属于不同的语系。作为第一个对越南语左边缘和句法-语义界面进行全面形式化研究的项目，该项目关注两个跨语言问题：句法如何纳入信息结构范畴？也就是说，信息结构范畴是否投射在句法结构中？根据越南的新的经验数据，该项目将专门比较制图（Rizzi 1997和后续工作）与非制图方法（Fanselow 2006，等人）。语法。时态这一语法范畴在不同语言中是通用的吗？更具体地说，孤立的语言是否提供了一个由隐蔽材料填充的中心时态T？或者从句法和语义的角度来看，它们真的是无时态的吗？第三个问题是语言特有的，涉及到从异位wh疑问句和其他左错位的例子中产生的时间解释效果：时间关联和左错位之间的相关性的本质是什么？它是语义的还是语用的？这个问题的答案将丰富我们对人类语言的知识，因为在屈折的印欧语言中，语序和这种类型的时间分辨率之间的联系是未经证实的。总之，该项目将提供第一个正式的语法和语义研究的左边缘和语法语义界面的越南语，及其跨语言的影响。在方法上，该项目是经验驱动的假设检验主要是基于从实地调查和实验证据收集的数据，而母语的直觉和文献中提供的数据作为假设建立的指导方针。

The project aims at contributing to the theoretical understanding of the left periphery, including e.g. the inventory and interpretation of functional projections in natural language, and their status as universal or language-specific. To the latter end, the project adopts a cross-linguistic perspective, by looking at an isolating language, Vietnamese (Mon-Khmer, Austro-Asiatic), and by comparing the findings for Vietnamese with that of much better studied inflectional languages of the Indo-European type. The exploration also complements the (partially inconclusive) investigations into Chinese, another isolating language but of a different family. As the first comprehensive formal study of left-periphery and syntax-semantics interface in Vietnamese, the project is concerned with two cross linguistic questions: how does syntax incorporate information structural categories? Namely, do information structural categories project in the syntactic structure? Based on the novel empirical data from Vietnamese, the project will specifically compare cartographic (Rizzi 1997 and follow-up work) with non-cartographic approaches (Fanselow 2006, et al.) to syntax. And is the grammatical category tense universal across languages? To be more specific, do isolating languages make available a head tense T filled by covert material? Or are they genuinely tenseless both from a syntactic and a semantic perspective? A third question is language specific and deals with temporal interpretation effects arising from ex-situ wh-questions and other instances of left dislocation: what is the nature of the correlation between temporal construal and left dislocation? Is it semantic or pragmatic? The answer to this question will enrich our knowledge of human language given that an association between word order and temporal resolution of this type is unattested in inflectional Indo-European languages. In sum, the project will offer the first formal syntactic and semantic investigation of the left periphery and the syntax-semantics interface in Vietnamese, and its cross-linguistic implications. Methodologically, the project is empirically driven in that hypothesis testing is primarily based on data collected from fieldwork and on experiment evidence while native speakers intuition and data available in the literature serve as hypothesis building guidelines only.