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Part of
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics
Edited by Nigel Duffield, Trang Phan and Tue Trinh
[Studies in Language Companion Series 211] 2019
► pp. 115–140

Chapter 6
Temporal reference in Vietnamese

| University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
The paper seeks to address gaps in current knowledge regarding cross-linguistic variation on the semantics of tense and aspect by examining how temporal reference is determined in Vietnamese. It is argued that, like St’át’imcets (Matthewson 2006), Vietnamese is a ‘superficially tenseless’ language in the sense that even though the grammar lacks overt tense morphology, every finite clause contains a phonologically empty non-future tense morpheme. I then argue that future tense in Vietnamese realised as a combination both the obligatory null tense morpheme and an overt spell-out of sẽ, which is the Vietnamese counterpart of the English WOLL operator (Abusch 1985). This means that sẽ itself is neither a purely a tense or solely an epistemic modal. Consequently, this study concludes that future time reference is systematically different from present and past time interpretations, which is similar to previous claims made by Abusch (1997), Kratzer (1998), and others.
Keywords: (future) tense, aspect, viewpoint aspect, tenselessness, cross-linguistic comparisons
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Vietnamese temporal data
    • 2.1Temporally unmarked predicates
    • 2.2Preverbal particles
  • 3.Previous literature
    • 3.1Duffield (2007)
    • 3.2Phan (2013)
  • 4.Problems with the previous accounts
    • 4.1Non-future interpretations
    • 4.2‘Future in the Past’ interpretations
    • 4.3Perfect interpretations
    • 4.4Progressive interpretations
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1The framework
    • 5.2Tense and viewpoint aspects
    • 5.3Futurity
    • 5.4The perfect aspect
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.211.06bui
References (23)
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