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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. 141–154

Chapter 7
Semantics of Vietnamese đã

| University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam

The analysis of đã has always been a highly controversial topic among Vietnamese linguists. Several accounts of the semantics of đã centre around the questions of whether it is used to locate a situation in the past (Bùi Đức Tịnh 1967, Lo-Cicero 2001) or to express an aspectual distinction (Nguyen 2006) – or both: see Trinh (2005), Phan (2013), and Phan & Duffield (this volume). In this article, it is claimed that đã does not function as tense marker, but that it is used instead to express a modal meaning which the speaker intends to provide for the situation she is communicating. Furthermore, contra those who assume that this marker is aspectual, it is claimed that the aspectual meaning is only derived from the interaction between đã and the semantics of the following predicate.

Keywords: tense, aspect, modality, data judgments
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Đã is not a past tense marker
  • 3. Đã is not a purely aspectual marker
  • 4. Đã as modal operator
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.211.07tru
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