On polarity emphasis, assertion and mood in Vietnamese and English

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On polarity emphasis, assertion and mood in Vietnamese and English§ Nigel Duffield Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Konan University, 8-9-1 Okamoto Higashinada-ku, Kobe 658-8501, Japan Received 28 January 2012; received in revised form 10 September 2013; accepted 13 September 2013 Available online 14 November 2013

Abstract The paper presents data from several languages---chiefly, Vietnamese and English---in support of two empirical claims concerning the syntax of polarity elements, assertion and mood (illocutionary force). The proposal draws on and develops Klein’s (1998) arguments for a decomposition of Finiteness: whereas Klein originally proposed that finiteness should be understood as involving at least two independent components---tense and assertion (validity)---this is elaborated to three in the present analysis, with polarity added as a distinct projection intermediate between the other two projections, to the left of Outer Aspect. Contrastive intonation---polarity emphasis--is argued to be able to target either polarity or assertion, by default the former; cf. Battlori and Hernanz (2011). With regard to assertion itself, it is shown that these features are projected rather low in Vietnamese phrase-structure, immediately to the left of the predicatephrase. It is further claimed on the basis of evidence from imperative, interrogative and modal constructions that this low structural position hosts many other illocutionary features in Vietnamese (notwithstanding the evidence of Romance and Germanic languages, which seem to support a much higher position for such features on the left periphery of the clause). The paper considers the theoretical implications of this apparently parametric contrast in the context of current Minimalist theorizing. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Vietnamese clause structure; Mood and modality; Representation of illocutionary force; Finiteness; (Correlates of do-support)

1. Introduction Recent work on polarity emphasis raises a number of issues concerning the relationship between polarity, assertion, and illocutionary force; in particular, questions about the representation in clausal syntax of what are, in the first instance, prosodic and/or semantic notions. In this paper, I address two more specific questions about the syntax of polarity emphasis: first, what---syntactically---is being emphasized? (or, why is emphasis where it is?); second, what is polarity? (Are negative and affirmative clauses really in direct opposition to one another, as this term implies; if so, is affirmation distinct from ‘‘assertion’’?). An overarching question relating these two is why negation, assertion and (other instances of) illocutionary force are expressed clause-medially in English---and, as it turns out, in Vietnamese---when, intuitively, all three notions might be § Note: The initial draft of this article was written during a year spent as Megumi Visiting Professor at Kobe College, Nishinomiya, Japan. Kobe College also generously supported my travel to the Workshop on Polarity Emphasis (held at the University of Ghent, September 2011). I am extremely grateful to the organizers of that workshop---Liliane Haegeman, Anne Breitbarth, and Karen de Clercq---for their invitation. The present paper developed out of the presentation delivered in Ghent: it has benefited significantly from the comments of other workshop participants, as well as from those of several anonymous reviewers. I should also like to acknowledge Trang Phan and Tue Trinh, not only for their invaluable data judgments but also for their theoretical insights. All remaining weaknesses are, of course, my own. The paper was extensively revised in 2013, after I took up a position at Konan University. E-mail address: [email protected].

0024-3841/$ -- see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.09.007

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expected to surface instead as operator-like elements on the left periphery, where they would more readily take scope over the whole clause. This mismatch between what may be termed ‘low Mood’ and the demands of compositional semantics has been a perennial thorn in the side of generative research (or spur to analysis, perhaps), probably since the inception of transformational grammar (Chomsky, 1957), certainly since Klima (1964)’s seminal work. Though this paper provides no definitive solutions to any of these problems, it does offer a detailed cartography of pre-verbal projections that allows us to arbitrate better among the analytic options currently available. The focus of this investigation is on the phrase-structure of Vietnamese, a radically isolating language that simultaneously happens to have a fairly rich inventory of free grammatical morphemes: other isolating languages such as Chinese varieties, for example, tend to lack any significant functional vocabulary, while languages with richer inflectional morphology tend toward greater morphological fusion or synthesis, properties that serve to obscure underlying structural relationships. Vietnamese thus affords an unusually transparent, ‘skeletal view’ of functional phrase-structure. More narrowly construed, the focus here is on the set of pre-verbal functional categories in Vietnamese that express assertion, negation and mood (illocutionary force), most specifically, on the varying interactions between the ‘assertion marker’ co´ and không, the chief exponent of sentential negation, across a variety of clause-types. An initial paradigm is presented in (1) below: from these examples, the functional and distributional parallels between Vietnamese co´ and English ‘auxiliary do’1 should be immediately apparent. (Here, and the following examples, italics indicate contrastive emphasis). (1)

a.

Anh co´

mua sách! buy book ‘He DID buy the book!’ Anh không (co´) mua sách! PRN NEG ASR buy book ‘He did NOT buy the book!’ Anh (co´) mua sách không? PRN Q buy book NEG ‘Did he buy the book?’ Co´ (chứ)! ASR (exclamative marker) ‘(He) did (indeed)!’ Không (co´)! NEG (ASR) ‘No, he didn’t!’ PRN

b.

c.

d.

e.

ASR

Note in passing that in Yes-No questions (1c), không follows co´, whereas in all other contexts where the two morphemes co-occur---negation invariably precedes co´. I return to this alternation presently. The paper is organized as follows. First, I set out the theoretical background to the study, and provide some empirical motivation for the current proposal from English and Romance. Next, extending previous work (Duffield, 2007), I present data from Vietnamese, outlining some of the ways in which assertion marking is structurally dissociated from tense and (outer) aspect. Assertion is shown to be projected low in the functional phrase-structure in Vietnamese, in a position distinct from that of sentential negation, which has scope over this position. (It is the projection occupied by negation--polarity phrase---that will be claimed to be the usual target of contrastive intonation, rather than the assertion phrase itself). Having dissociated polarity from assertion, I consider the properties of the assertion phrase in more detail: it is claimed that that assertion is but one feature specification of a more general Mood Phrase, and that many---possibly all---illocutionary features are initially associated with this lower projection, at least in Vietnamese.2 Throughout the discussion, explicit comparisons are drawn between Vietnamese co´ and English auxiliary do in Present-Day English (PDE), as well as in Early Modern English (EmodE) and in English Child Grammar (CG): it is proposed that the treatment of the Vietnamese data presented here carries over to English, forcing some revision of standard analyses of do-support as well.

1 Auxiliary do in Present Day English (PDE) is often referred to as ‘expletive’, ‘pleonastic’ or ‘dummy’ do: these terms, all of which imply semantic vacuity, are misnomers if the claims of the present paper prove correct. 2 In Duffield (2011, 2013a), it is claimed that assertion co´ is preferentially associated with eventive contexts: this is taken to imply that co´ may be the realization of a (temporally-unbounded) event argument. It remains open whether this implies an additional projection (EP; see Travis, 2010), or whether Mood hosts this event argument also. Space constraints preclude any discussion of these data here.

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2. Theoretical background 2.1. Syntactic Structures The present analysis is significantly indebted to two previous theoretical proposals. The first of these is the original generative approach to negation, emphasis and question formation set out in Chomsky (1957), in which all three phenomena are analyzed in terms of closely inter-related transformational rules: TNOT, TQ, and TA, respectively. In Syntactic Structures, the common target of these transformations was a medial position C, situated immediately to the right of the base position of verbal affixes and to the left of the lexical predicate in the linear description of the base: anachronistically speaking, following ‘IP.’ The first of these rules derived negative sentences from an affirmative Deep Structure, by introducing the lexical item NOT into this location. Given extrinsic rule-ordering, negative-insertion resulted in the non-adjacency of Af and the main verb, which in turn triggered do-support to carry the stranded affixes. The question formation rule, TQ, also operated on the affixal position Af, exchanging this position with that of the clausal subject. In more contemporary terms, this came to re-interpreted as the claim that [+Q]-features, inserted immediately pre-verbally, raise to C(omp) via IP projections; cf. Rizzi (1990), Noonan (1989), Aoun and Li (1993). In languages with generalized verb movement such features are assumed to carried up to C by the verb. In English, however, as with the negation transformation TNOT, TQ had the effect of triggering do-support, since now the subject intervened between the affix and its verbal host (blocking Affix-hopping). Finally, to treat emphatic constructions, Chomsky ‘. . .set up a morpheme A of contrastive stress to which the following morphophonemic rule applied: V..+A --> ‘‘V, where’’ indicates extra heavy stress.’ As noted in Duffield (2007), Chomsky insisted that the three transformational rules were intimately related, not least through their common reference to a low insertion point for these features (immediately to the left of the verb). Several key points should be observed about the (1957) analysis. First, though it provides a parallel treatment of negation and assertion, it remains unclear whether TNOT and TA target precisely the same syntactic position, or two adjacent positions in the string. This vagueness stems from the fact that neither TNOT nor TA target any constituent directly3: rather, they insert new material ‘into space’ to the right of the ‘Infl’ constituent (Af). This property of the transformations, taken in association with the fact that TNOT was evidently not meaning-preserving, led to the abandonment of TNOT in later versions of the theory, especially those that adopted a more sweeping interpretation of the Projection Principle (Chomsky, 1989) (under which all lexical items were assumed to be introduced in the base component, prior to the application of any movement rules).4 Once negation came to be analyzed as a d-structure property in this sense, formal parallels with TA were lost; in subsequent treatments of do-support, emphatic do is either ignored entirely or relegated to a footnote (as is the case in Pollock’s original paper). Consequently, most of the extensive research on the NEGP HYPOTHESIS, especially following Pollock (1989), disregards the close relationship between negation and affirmative emphasis. Moreover, notwithstanding the earlier work cited above, most contemporary analyses have tended to assume that [+Q] features are associated either with the verb itself, and/or with a C-domain projection high on the left periphery---for example, with ForceP in Rizzi (1997, 2002), as in (2) below. Once again, the idea of ‘low emphasis’ has been lost. (2)

Force < Topic < Focus < Finiteness < IP

Laka (1990, 1994) is a notable exception to this; cf. also Haegeman (1995).5 Laka (1990) postulates a functional head---labeled SP, in her original proposal---that hosts features relating to emphasis, truth-value and illocutionary force: she claims further that this projection is parameterized such that it is ordered below IP in English, but above IP in Romance and Basque. Current Minimalist theorizing however---for example, Boeckx’ Strong Uniformity Thesis (2008)---excludes this kind of parameterization6; hence, it is plausible to suppose that this node is universally projected low in the functional architecture. The Vietnamese data presented below are consistent with Laka’s general claim that features relating to

3

Unlike TQ, which targets the Af element in the structural description. Strictly speaking, the Projection Principle only applied to elements involved in theta-marking: i.e., to predicates and their associated arguments: there was no requirement that it should apply to adverbials and other adjuncts---see Lebeaux (1988)---or to expletive pronouns. Nor yet to functional categories. Notwithstanding this fact, throughout GB it was normally assumed that lexical insertion took place ‘in a block’ either immediately following---or simultaneously with---the creation of d-structure: what Seuren (1974: 3) calls PRE-TRANSFORMATIONAL UNITARY LEXICAL INSERTION. 5 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to Pollock’s own footnote (51)---see also Chomsky (1989)---and for clarifying the importance and relevance of Laka’s work. 6 Or indeed any kind of parameterization whatsoever. According to Boeckx (2011), the SUT asserts that ‘‘Principles of Narrow Syntax are not subject to parameterization; nor are they affected by lexical parameters.’’ Boeckx continues: ‘‘Put differently, if Minimalist research is on the right track, there can be no parameters within the statement of the general principles that shape natural-language syntax. In other words, narrow syntax solves interface design specifications optimally in the same way in all languages (contra Baker 2008 and Fukui 2006). Modifying Marantz (1995: 380), Minimalism can be seen as the end of parametric syntax (Boeckx 2005: 208)’’. 4

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truth-value and illocutionary force are projected relatively low (below TP) in clausal phrase-structure; our proposal will be, however, that this low position is more highly articulated than previously supposed, involving at least two dissociable functional categories (NegP (PolP) and Assertion (Mood)). 2.2. Klein (1998): decomposing finiteness The second theoretical proposal underpinning the analysis presented here is the de-compositional treatment of Finiteness proposed by Klein (1998, 2006), in which Finiteness is reduced to two more primitive concepts: TENSE and ASSERTION. A key piece of empirical evidence for this de-composition---especially germane to the present discussion--involves ambiguities found in contexts of contrastive intonation. Klein observes that in English declarative sentences containing auxiliaries other than do, emphasis on the auxiliary gives rise to two distinct interpretations: either, as in (3b) below, it is interpreted as bearing on the TENSE of the prior utterance; alternatively, where tense is neutralized, as in (3c) what is emphasized is understood as what Klein terms the ‘ASSERTION VALIDITY’ of the utterance: (3)

a. b. c.

The book was on the table. The book is on the table. --- No, the book was on the table. The book was not on the table. No, that’s wrong, the book was on the table.

As Klein expresses it: ‘the finite element was carries at least two distinct meaning components: 1. the tense component: it marks past, in contrast to present or future; 2. [the assertion component:] it marks the claim --- the fact that the situation described by the utterance indeed obtains, in contrast to the opposite claim.’ It is the latter, tense-independent, meaning in (3c) that is most relevant: as will become clear, it is exactly this meaning that is conveyed by Vietnamese pre-verbal particle co´ in declarative structures (both affirmative and negative declaratives). Significantly, Klein points out that in English this sense cannot be borne by main verbs, but only by auxiliaries; consequently, in emphatic contexts where no other tense auxiliary is available, do must be inserted. This is exemplified by the contrasts in (4) below. In (4a), emphatic stress on the main verb can be used to contrast lexical meaning (like vs. love) or, marginally, to contrast tense, as in (4b). However, to contrast assertion validity---that is to say, to indicate that the situation described by the predicate in fact obtained---do/did insertion is required, as in (4c). Notice that the use of a stressed lexical verb is unacceptable in this context. (4)

a. b. c.

John liked Mary (but he didn’t love her). ?John doesn’t love Mary, but he loved her (then). John didn’t love Mary. --- Yes (No), he did love Mary. (#Yes/No, he loved Mary).

If Klein’s interpretation of the alternations in (4) is correct, then a key function of do-support in present-day English (PDE)---quite independent of its morphological role in hosting tense affixes---is to express assertion validity.7 This conclusion has immediate theoretical implications: the necessity for do-support to express assertion validity can be taken to imply what it standardly implies in other more familiar instances of do-support, namely, that abstract morphemes projected independently of the verb require lexicalization, a requirement that cannot be satisfied by finite verb-raising in PDE (Chomsky, 1965, 1989, Pollock 1989, amongst many others). In other words, the structural implication of Klein’s proposal is that Assertion (Asr), like Tense, should be considered an autonomous functional category, projected externally to the predicate phrase. 2.3. Evidence for low assertion (in English and Romance) Where exactly in the pre-verbal domain is this assertion morpheme located? Two considerations internal to English suggest that assertion is projected low in the phrase-structure, on the opposite side of syntactic negation from Tense. First, there is the evidence from n’t encliticisation, illustrated in (5) below. If one assumes, following Pollock (1989), Chomsky (1989) and others, that the negative affix n’t coming to attach to do and other auxiliaries is the result of head-movement via Neg to T---and beyond, in the case of T-C movement (5b))---then standard head movement considerations (e.g. Travis’

7 To obviate any possible confusion, it is important to understand that Klein uses contrastive intonation merely as a diagnostic of the existence of assertion validity independently of tense: his purpose is not to provide an analysis of emphasis placement. In what follows, I will argue that while Klein is correct to isolate assertion validity as a functional primitive, this is only contingently related to contrastive intonation.

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(1984) Head Movement Constraint, and its Minimalist successors (see Roberts, 2003)), require these auxiliaries to be merged below NegP in the first instance, as annotated in (5a) and (5b), respectively (omitting irrelevant traces)8: (5)

a. b.

[TPShe [Tdidin’tj[NegP [Neg titj [xp [x ti [vPleave. ]]]]]]]. [CP [Cdidin’tj [TPshe [T titj [NegP [Neg titj [xp [x t [vPleave? ]]]]]]]]].

In Pollock’s (1989) analysis, schematized in (6), this lower node x is labeled Agr, and is assumed to host Agreement features. Yet even setting aside Minimalist misgivings about the existence of Agr nodes on theoretical grounds, some obvious empirical reflections cast doubt on this label: not only is there scant morphological evidence for the idea that verbal agreement is syntactically represented in Present Day English,---especially given the fact that are no non-zero exponents of agreement that do not simultaneously mark tense (cf. Bobaljik and Thráinsson, 1998)---but, equally tellingly perhaps---the majority of the auxiliary verbs to which n’t attaches, namely, the set of modal auxiliaries, display no personnumber agreement whatsoever.9 In short, theoretical considerations require that do and other modal auxiliaries should be initially projected to a position below NegP, while prima facie empirical evidence suggests that this is not an Agr position. (6)

TP T’ T

NegP Neg’ Neg

?AgrP ?Agr

VP

One consideration that favors the idea that English auxiliary do is initially associated with an assertion feature is the fact that contrastive intonation ‘moves with do’ in inversion structures: that is to say, in emphatic questions. The examples in (7) below show that contrastive intonation always targets the moved auxiliary in C in affirmative interrogative clauses, as well as in negative interrogatives involving n’t (though not, crucially, in negative clauses involving not, a point returned to directly). (7)

a.

b.

c.

She didn’t say that whales were fish. ---Well, what did she say, then? #---Well, what did she say, then? She will admit to planning the robbery, and receiving the jewels. ---What won’t she admit to? #---What won’t she admit to?10 He went/has been shopping every day of his vacation. #--- Did he not buy enough on the first day?! --- Did he not buy enough on the first day?! #--- Has he not bought enough already?! ---Has he not bought enough already?!

8 A reviewer points out that patterns involving auxiliaries bearing more than one reduced affix (e.g., couldn’t’ve, mightn’t’ve etc.) provide support for an alternative analysis in which n’t is lexically attached. Even if this were the case, it would not speak against a more abstract feature-checking version of the analysis proposed in (5) above. It is also worth noting that---in direct contrast to n’t---the reduced form ‘ve cannot be carried to C in interrogative constructions, but instead attaches to the subject NP: cf. ‘Couldn’t he’ve called us?/*Couldn’t’ve he called us?/*Could hen’t’ve called us?’. This distributional difference clearly suggests separate treatments for the two elements. 9 Of course, the lower node in (6) could instantiate some syntactically-expressed feature other than either Agreement or Assertion. A likely candidate is Viewpoint Aspect (Outer Aspect), in the terminology of Travis, 2010). Indeed, it is claimed immediately below that Outer Aspect is projected in Vietnamese, and, quite possibly in English too; see Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria (2007). However, the Vietnamese evidence will also reveal Aspect and Assertion to be independent nodes, with Assertion projected even lower than (Outer) Aspect, closer to the predicate phrase. 10 In response to a reviewer’s question: unstressed will rather than (stressed) does/did is used in (7b) so that contrastive intonation only plays a role in the response in each example, rather than in the original assertion as well: given that unstressed do is unacceptable in Present Day (adult) English declaratives (see below), this is the closest minimal contrast.

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As observed in Duffield (2007), these effects have never received a satisfactory treatment in the generative literature. Even the original transformational analysis given in Syntactic Structures only succeeds if the transformational rules are extrinsically ordered in a particular way: crucially, do-support must be triggered between the insertion of the emphatic morpheme A and the application of TA, and TA must precede TQ; otherwise, it should be impossible for A to be carried along by TQ. It happens that this extrinsic ordering runs contrary to Chomsky’s own proposal, which is for do-support to apply last (cf. Chomsky, 1989: 63). On a more contemporary---structural rather than linear---analysis, the only principled way to derive (7a) or (7b) by a uniform rule of stress-placement would be to adopt the following assumptions. First, it must be assumed that in English auxiliary do is initially projected in a position lower than T---especially in (7b), given the analysis of n’t sketched earlier. Second, Asr and other illocutionary features---including [+Q]-features---must occupy the same distinguished baseprojection, such that do can bear both [+Q]-features and [+ASR] features: standardly, raising of do as far as C is driven precisely by the need to check these [+Q] features. Finally, we must suppose that the head of this projection is the initial target of the English ‘Aux-to-Comp’ rule, hence, ‘Aux-to-Comp’ is really Asr-(OAsp)-T-C. However, this analysis fails to explain the contrast between (7b) and (7c) above. If emphasis were indeed an initial property of the assertion head carried to C by successive head-movement (as has just been suggested), we should not expect (nonclitic) not to bear emphasis in (7c); that is to say, the hashed examples in (7c) should be the grammatically acceptable ones. Hence, the contrast between (7b) and (7c) points to a more complex derivation in which---contra Klein (op. cit.)---contrastive intonation is only contingently associated with assertion (Asr). Under this alternative, schematized in (8) and developed further below, emphasis is initially a feature of the higher intermediate projection that hosts not (as a specifier) or n’t as a head: in the latter case, this feature is picked up in transit by assertion do as it raises to T.11 (8)

Of course, by definition---and as demonstrated in (7a)---polarity emphasis applies just as well in affirmative as in negative contexts: hence, NegP in (8) should be properly be relabeled PolP. We return to consider some additional evidence for this below. Summarizing the discussion thus far, the English facts and analyses presented above offer prima facie evidence for two functional categories below IP: a generalized polarity phrase, situated immediately below Tense, and---below this projection---a functional category associated with Assertion (validity), and initially lexicalized by auxiliary do (for want of finite verb-raising). In labeling this latter position Agr, previous syntactic treatments have at once ignored the assertive function of auxiliary do, and over-interpreted the structural significance of the English 3rd person present tense marker -s. Before turning to Vietnamese, it is useful to consider some comparative evidence from Romance which offers some further motivation for two key aspects of this proposal. The first piece of evidence supports the idea that polarity is associated with a position below TP, the second, the notion that emphasis may optionally target an even lower functional category. As for low polarity, consider the examples in (9) cited in Poletto and Zanuttini (2011),12 involving what the authors term ‘polarity particles’. In the Italian example (9b), sì/no follow the complementizer di, which Poletto and Zanuttini claim is located in FinP, the lowest projection of the left periphery; similarly in (9c), oui ou non appears to the right of the French tense auxiliary as (though the alternant in (9d) shows that pre-verbal placement is also acceptable): (9)

11 12

a.

Je crois que oui/non. I think.1SG that yes/no ‘I think so/not.’

Unless the specifier is filled by a reinforcing adverbial element: see below. Originally due to Authier (2011).

[P&Z ex. (28a)]

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b.

c.

d.

Credo [FinP [di [sì/no.]] believe.1SGof yes/no ‘I think so/not.’ Est-ce que [TP tu as [ oui ou non [sorti les poubelles]]]? Q-PART you have yes or no taken-out the garbage ‘Did you or did you not take out the garbage?’ Est-ce que oui ou non tu as sorti les poubelles? Q-PART yes or no you have taken-out the garbage ‘Did you or did you not take out the garbage?’

[P&Z ex. (28b)]

[P&Z ex. (29b)]

[P&Z ex. (29a)]

As for the existence of an even lower functional category, additional motivation is found in the divergent distributions of two emphatic particles in Catalan (bé vs. ben (also pas)), as exemplified in (10) from Battlori and Hernanz (2011): (10)

a.

b.

c.

d.

En Joan m’ha ben enganyat. The Joan CL.DAT has indeed deceived ‘John has deceived me indeed.’ Bé ha arribat tard la soprano. Indeed has arrived late the soprano ‘The soprano has indeed arrived late.’ La soprano s’ha ben enfadat (quan li ho han dit) the soprano CL-has really got.angry (when CL.DAT CL.ACC have said ‘The soprano really got angry when they told her.’ Bé s’ha enfadat la soprano (quan li ho han dit) indeed CL-has got.angry the soprano (when CL.DAT CL.ACC have said ‘But the soprano really got angry when they told her.’

[B-H (34c)]

[B-H (37a)]

[B-H (39a)]

[B-H (39b)

Partly on the basis of these contrasts, Battlori and Hernanz (2011) propose a structural distinction between ‘high EPM [emphatic polarity marker] and ‘low EPM’. Specifically, they claim that13: ‘low EPMs are located in a functional projection FP between IP and VP, possibly above the vP field, as in [(10) below]’ (11)

[CP . . . [FOCUSP EPMi [POLP ti [IP . . . [FP low EPM [vP . . .]]]]]]

The Catalan data thus reveal that emphasis may be associated with more than one functional projection, while making explicit the claim that the lower of the two functional projections is positioned very low indeed, immediately above vP. We turn now to Vietnamese, a language that by common consensus lacks agreement of any type, be it morphological or syntactic, and which also lacks verb-raising beyond v. It will be demonstrated that the position initially occupied by assertion co´ is independent of that other syntactically realized features, including those expressing tense, aspect and negation. Most relevantly, assertion is shown to be realized independently of polarity emphasis. On the other hand, assertion co´ is shown to occupy the same structural position as other exponents of illocutionary force, including especially imperatives, suggesting that Mood (Force) features are projected much lower in clausal phrase-structure than is standardly assumed. 3. Fractionating finiteness: tense, aspect, and assertion (validity) in Vietnamese Having established the theoretical background and considered some relevant data from European languages, let us now examine the distribution and function of Vietnamese co´ relative to other preverbal TAM markers. The examples in

13 Data cited by Martins (2011) are indicative of a low structural position for emphasis in Portuguese also, although the position of negation vis-àvis emphasis markers seems to be reversed (plausibly due to the fact---or better, the claim made by Martins (ibid.)---that ‘low não’ in Portuguese is an instance of predicate negation, rather than sentential negation). See also Zanuttini (1991, 1993).

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(12) and (13) below illustrate the position of assertion co´ vis-à-vis two aspectual morphemes: the anterior morpheme đã, and the imperfective (durative) morpheme đang: (12)

a.

b.

Tôi [ đã [ co´ gặp anh Phòng một laˆ` n từ thời còn ở Tiên Phước]]14 ANT ASR meet PRN Phòng one time from time still be.LOC Tien Phuoc ‘I met Phòng once when I was still in Tiên Phước.’ Sự ra´ˆ t vui vì tôi [đã [ co´ gặp Sự trong la`ˆ n về tha˘ m nhà..]] Sư very happy because I ANT ASR meet Su in time return visit home ‘Sự is very happy because I visited when I returned home for a visit last

Evidence for treating anterior đã as an exponent of a lower functional category--- (Viewpoint) Aspect, rather than (past) Tense---is detailed in Trinh (2005), Duffield and Phan (2010), Phan (2013), Phan and Duffield (in prep.), Duffield (2013c).15 This includes the fact that đã may occur in present- and future-perfect contexts (13) and (14), respectively, as well as in counterfactuals, as in (15), none of which contexts are ordinarily compatible with a preterite interpretation: (13)

a.

b.

(14)

a.

b.

(15)

Ông a´ˆ y

đã

PRN

ANT

già rồi. old already ‘He is old (already).’ Harry Potter đã chết! Harry Potter ANT die ‘Harry Potter is dead!’16 DEM

Ba˘` ng giờ này na˘ m sau, chị đã là giáo viên rồi. by time this year next, she ANT COP teacher already By next year, she’ll be working as a teacher.’ Đến cuối na˘ m nay, tôi đã ra.trường. arrive end year DEM PRN ANT go.out.school ‘I shall have graduated by the end of the year.’

(Nếu) ông no´i với tôi sớm hơn thì tôi đã sa˘ n so´c đến việc ông. (if) PRN say with me early more TOP I ANT take.care work PRN ‘If you had told me [about earlier], I would have taken care of that business of yours.’

Furthermore, as originally observed by Trinh (2005), even in past-time contexts đã generally admits a perfect, rather than preterite, interpretation, or is at least ambiguous between these two interpretations---except in negative declaratives, in which only the preterite reading is available. The unmarked alternation is illustrated in (16ab), the preterite restriction in (16cd). (16)

a.

No´ đã

đọc sách. read book ‘He read books/has read books.’ Cuối.cùng anh a´ˆ y đã thắng cuộc. 2 finally PRN DEM ANT win contest ‘Finally, he won the contest./he has won the contest.’ No´ đã không đọc sách. PRN ASP NEG read book ‘He did not read books./*He has not read books.’ Anh aˆ´ y đã không về Việt Nam. 2 PRN DEM ANT NEG return Vietnam ‘He did not return to Vietnam.’/*He has not returned to Vietnam.’ PRN

b.

c.

d.

14 15 16

ASP

[Trinh, 2005: 16]

[Trinh, 2005: 10]17

Example (11b): [buddhanet.net/budsas/uni/u-mcdi/nhatky-2003.htm, accessed 16/12/08]. See also Phan (2013), for a comprehensive discussion of the representation of Aspect in Vietnamese. Film subtitle: translation of ‘Harry Potter is dead!’ in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter và Bảo bối Tử thaˆ` n).

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As for đang, the data in (17) show clearly that this element functions as an atemporal marker of durative aspect. Đang is interpreted similarly to the English imperfective morpheme --ing, in the sense that it is free of temporal anchoring; however, as shown by the examples in (18), it is distinguished from --ing in being able to co-occur with stative predicates (in contexts referring to specific events or situations): (17)

a.

b.

(18)

a.

b.

c.

Lúc đo´, họ đang chơi qua`ˆ n vợt. place DEM2 PRN ASP play tennis ‘At that time, they were playing tennis.’ Sang na˘ m, vào ngày này, chắc tôi đang làm ở Pháp. enter year, enter day DEM, sure I ASP work in France ‘By this time next year, I shall be working in France.’ Cụ đang muốn co´ một bàn tay man.mát xoa cái đaˆ` u. PRN ASP want have 1 CL hand cool rub CL head ‘He wants (lit. is wanting) a cool hand rubbing his head.’ Trẻ em đang biết raˆ´ t nhiều điều không nên biết. young PRN ASP know very much thing NEG should know ‘Young people know (lit. are knowing) a lot of things they shouldn’t know.’ Hãy quy´ những gì mình đang co´.18 IMP treasure PL what self ASP have ‘Treasure what you have (lit. are having).’

Significantly, as demonstrated in (19), đang is the only temporal/aspectual morpheme that can appear to the right of the sentential negation marker không (though as 19b indicates it can also appear on the left); by contrast, future sẽ and perfect đã are prohibited from following không: (19)

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

f.

17

Tôi không đang a˘ n cơm. PRN NEG ASP eat rice ‘I am not having a meal.’ Tôi đang không a˘ n cơm. PRN ASP NEG eat rice ‘I am not having a meal.’ *Tôi không sẽ làm việc đo´. PRN NEG FUT do job DEM ‘*I not will do that.’ Tôi sẽ không làm việc đo´. PRN NEG FUT do job DEM ‘I will not do that.’ *Tôi không đã làm việc đo´. PRN NEG ASP do job DEM ‘*I not have done that.’ Tôi đã không làm việc đo´. PRN ASP NEG do job DEM ‘I didn’t do that.’

A grammatically acceptable way to express the meaning of ‘He has not read books’ in Vietnamese is as in (i):

(i) ‘No´ chưa đọc sách.’ PRN not.yet read book ‘He has not read books.’ See below for discussion of chưa in Yes-No questions; also Duffield (2013a). 18 Example (18c) shows that co´ also functions as a light main verb, here corresponding to English possessional have. Note that co´ also functions as an existential predicate. In order to obtain an accurate description of assertion co´ it is crucial to distinguish auxiliary and main verb usages. See Duffield (in prep).

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The most obvious reason for treating đang as an aspect marker separate from tense, however, is that the two are not in complementary distribution. Example (20a)---which also features the negative imperative morpheme đừng, considered again below---shows that future sẽ and aspectual đang may co-occur, though the unacceptability of (20b) shows that this is not true of future sẽ and perfect đã, for reasons to be discussed directly. Notice, in particular, the minimal contrast between (20b) and the acceptable future-perfect examples in (14) above, which strongly implies that the latter restriction is syntactic rather than interpretive in nature. (20)

a.

b.

Đừng gọi điện cho tôi từ 7 đến 8 giờ. Lúc đo´ [TPchúng tôi sẽ [ASP đang NEG.IMP call tel. give I from 7 to 8 hour. Time DEM2 pl I FUT ASP have.meal [dùng.cơm tối]]]. evening ‘Don’t call me between 7 and 8! At that time we shall be having dinner.’ Vào giờ này tuaˆ` n tới [TPtôi (*sẽ) đã [nghỉ mát ở Hawaii rồi]]. come hour DEM week next I FUT ASP holiday be.LOC Hawaii already ‘By this time next week I will have been on holiday in Hawaii.’

The data presented thus far serve to establish the distributional point that assertion co´ appears to the right of projections bearing tense (sẽ) and (viewpoint) aspect features---hence, syntactically lower than these projections, given that Vietnamese is a rigidly right-branching language. The data in (21) show that co´ appears even lower still, to the right of the sentential negation marker (không). (21)

a.

b.

Hôm qua anh aˆ´ y (đã) không (*đã) co´ đến nhà chị. yesterday PRN DEM PAST NEG ANT ASR arrive house prn ‘He didn’t go to your house yesterday.’ Trong bản khai, no´ (đã) không (*đã) co´ no´i gì đến tổ chức cả. in CL statement, PRN PAST NEG ANT ASR say what about organization all. ‘In his statement, he didn’t say anything at all about the organization.’

Observe once again in these examples---as was true of those in (16) above---that đã has an exclusively temporal (preterite) interpretation when it precedes negative không. Trinh (2005) treats this restriction in terms of lexical homophony: on his proposal, there are two separate lexical entries in the Vietnamese lexicon---perfect đã1 and preterite đã2, occupying distinct underlying positions. In affirmative contexts, perfect đã1 is taken to be initially inserted under PERF, an aspectual category close to---or just inside---the VP, and raised to T. Negation is assumed to block this raising, and so an alternative morpheme---đã2---is inserted directly to T, yielding the exclusively preterite reading in negative contexts. Duffield (2013a)---see also Phan (submitted)---propose a revised analysis that dispenses with lexical homonymy. As these authors point out, đã is only one of a large inventory of ‘multifunctional’ items in Vietnamese that derive their specific interpretation---either partially or exclusively---from their structural position. On occasion, apparent lexical meanings are even neutralized and overridden in particular syntactic contexts. In the examples in (22), for instance, modal auxiliaries that otherwise have distinct modal interpretations in pre-verbal position (nên = should, được = can) are interpreted synonymously as non-modal aspectual morphemes whenever they occur immediately post-verbally: (22)

a.

b.

c.

d.

Họ nên làm việc lớn. PRN should do job big ‘They should do great things.’ Họ làm nên việc lớn. PRN do ASP. job big ‘They did (made) great things.’ Cô aˆ´ y được kiếm việc. PRN DEM can seek job ‘She is/was allowed to seek a job.’ Cô a´ˆ y kiếm được việc. PRN DEM seek ASP. job ‘She found a job.’

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This implies that a solution involving homonymy is not only redundant in this particular case (đã), but that it misses a more significant generalization concerning the representation of functional meaning in Vietnamese grammar, namely, that some kinds of meaning inhere in syntactic configurations, rather than in lexical entries. See Duffield (2013b) for further discussion. In the alternative analysis of the papers cited above, there is only one (underspecified) đã, which derives its interpretation from the positions with which it is syntactically associated: if instead of raising from Asp to T---the default case in affirmative clauses---đã is inserted directly into T, then only the preterite reading is available. The alternative analysis shares with Trinh (ibid.) the assumption that aspectual đã is initially projected below negation, and that it is the presence of negation that blocks the perfect interpretation. However, it diverges from Trinh’s analysis in that aspect is taken to be projected outside of the verb-phrase---crucially, higher than the position of assertion co´---as in (23) cf. (8) above19: (23)

TP XP

T T da

NegP Neg

AspP1

không Asp1 (da)

AspP2 Asp2 ang Asr

AsrP VP

co

Whether or not this analysis of đã proves correct, the data clearly demonstrates that đã invariably appears to the left of durative đang, whose base position---below that of negation (không)---is less controversial, and that both đang and không appear to the left of co´. Hence, the distributional evidence clearly shows that at least one aspectual category intervenes between the position of negation (taken as an instance of polarity) and assertion co´, and further implies that assertion co´ must be projected very low indeed, immediately outside the thematic verbphrase. 4. Separating polarity emphasis from assertion 4.1. Assertion without emphasis Before more closely considering the properties of this low clausal position---in particular, the interactions between co´ and other exponents of mood---it is important to draw attention to a fact about assertion co´ that may have been lost sight of in the discussion thus far. A somewhat ironic property of most of the Vietnamese examples up to (22) is that assertion co´ need not be interpreted especially emphatically. Indeed, almost all of these sentences would receive much the same interpretation and be equally grammatical, were co´ unstressed or omitted entirely. Hence, the significant observation is that in declarative clauses co´ is interpreted emphatically only if it bears contrastive stress. In this regard, Vietnamese co´ shows closer parallels with unstressed do in Late Middle and Early Modern English (ca. 1280-1630CE) declarative clauses than it does with do in most (adult) Present Day varieties (PDE). It is well-known from the work of Ellegård (1953) and subsequent researchers that during the Late ME/EModE period periphrastic do-support was found in free variation with raised finite lexical verbs in negative assertions, and in interrogative and imperative contexts, as illustrated in (24) and (25), respectively.20 Perhaps less well-known, however, is that unstressed do also appeared in unmarked affirmative contexts, as in the examples in (26) below. Indeed, it happens that in the first three scenes of Act 1 of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, from which most of these examples are drawn, there are more

19 As we shall see in the next section, the analysis of Yes-No questions offered in Duffield (2013a) supports---and indeed requires---đã to be projected below không. 20 See Visser (1963--1973), Warner (1993), Baekken (2002), Vulanovic´ (2002), Schütze (2003); also Denison (1985, 2000).

N. Duffield / Lingua 137 (2013) 248--270

259

instances of (unemphatic) do in affirmative declaratives (26) than there are cases of do-support replacing raised finite verbs in negative or interrogative contexts (24, 25)21: (24) (25)

(26)

a. b. a. b. c. d. a. b. c.

No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir (Romeo & Juliet Act 1, Scene 1: 45). It is an honour that I dream not of (R&J Act 1, Scene 3: 70). A crutch, a crutch! why call you for a sword? (R&J Act 1, Scene 1: 69) Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night (R&J, Act 1, Scene 5: 52). Fear me not (R&J, Act 1 Scene 1: 35) Thou villain Capulet, --- Hold me not, let me go (R&J, Act 1 Scene 1: 71) Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents’ strife (R&J, Prolog: 7) Here were the servants of your adversary, And yours, close fighting ere I did approach (R&J, Act 1, Scene 1: 100) So early walking did I see your son. . .’ (Romeo & Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1:120).

Similar phenomena are observable in English child language (CG). Richards (2005), for example, mentions independent reports, by Menyuk (1969) and Fletcher (1979), of children using unstressed did in declarative clauses, while his own search of Leopold’s (1949) diary studies reveal that one of the children, Karla, used unstressed medial did for a short period at around two years of age (27a). Richards also reports his own daughter’s production of unstressed medial do, at age 2:4, reproduced in (27b): (27)

a. b.

I did fall [Leopold, 1949, section 586, note 583, cited in Richards (2005) I eat my dress. . . [playing alone] my dress I did [unstressed] eat it [laughs] /ə/ don’t eat dresses no-o I do [unstressed] eat his dress. Mm [Fiona, 2;4, cited in Richards, 2005: 232]

Though most of the cases reported in the literature appear to be sporadic and restricted to an early phase of language development, these may not be necessary properties. As Richards notes, ‘‘if one really starts to hunt for examples, it may be surprising how many UDAs [unstressed do in declarative affirmatives] turn up’’ (Richards, 2005: 232). Other variations are also possible: one of my own bilingual children (J 6:5), has settled on a grammar of English with affix-lowering---hence few, if any UDAs---but with highly productive, near-invariable, do-support in subject questions, as in the examples in (28)22:

21 This apparent optionality also finds parallels with current non-Standard varieties such as that of the English South-West. In these varieties however, as reported by Nagle (1994), do is always habitual, never completive/eventive. 22 J’s ‘extended non-target stage’ is plausibly due to attrition: after the age of 4.3, he (was) moved to Japan, since which time his exposure to English-speaking peers has been drastically reduced.

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a. b. c.

What did happen? Who did come? Who does make those things?

Considered in more theoretical terms, what all of these examples show is that earlier varieties of English, as well as some current varieties of Child English, freely allow unstressed do-support in sentential contexts in which no other element blocks the merger of the finite verb with tense features (Affix-hopping). In the absence of any morpho-syntactic motivation for doinsertion such as the Stray Affix Filter, Chomsky and Lasnik (1977), a reasonable conclusion is that unemphatic do is lexicalizing some other syntactic feature in these cases: assertion would seem to be a plausible candidate. If these examples of unstressed do/co´ serve to establish that assertion and emphasis are only contingently related, two new questions arise: first, why does contrastive emphasis nevertheless typically fall on auxiliary do (in English, on co´ in Vietnamese) in declarative clauses?; second, why is assertion projected where it is? 4.2. Emphasis on elements other than assertion With respect to the first question, one possibility is that this is largely an accident of linear adjacency: assertion do and co´ are targeted not because they themselves bear any inherent suprasegmental [emphasis] feature, but because they happen to be in the right place at the right time, so to speak. A key point to observe in this regard is that there are many contexts in both languages in which polarity emphasis targets medial elements other than do or co´, respectively. We have already seen---in (7c) above---that sentential not bears stress in negative interrogatives in English; the examples in (29) confirm that the same is true of negative declaratives (which also allow never, in certain dialects). As for affirmative declaratives in English, if such sentences also contain the reinforcing adverbials so or too (again, depending on dialect), then it is these latter elements rather than do that attract stress, as shown in (30): (29)

(30)

a. a.’ b. a. b. b.’ c. c.’

She did not say that! (#She did not say that!) She loves you! --- She never! She did say that! She did so say that! (#She did so say that!) She did too say that! (#She did too say that!)

In every case, placement of emphasis on any other element yields anomalous results: in adult PDE English do must be stressed in (30a), for example, but cannot be in (30b) or (29a’). A very similar pattern is observed in Vietnamese. Consider again the initial paradigm in (1), repeated here for convenience. (1)

a.

Anh co´

mua sách! buy book ‘He DID buy the book!’ Anh không (co´) mua sách! PRN NEG ASR buy book ‘He did NOT buy the book!’ Anh (co´) mua sách không? PRNQ buy book NEG ‘Did he buy the book?’ Co´ (chứ!) ASR (exclamative marker) ‘(He) did (indeed)!’ Không (co´)! NEG (ASR) ‘No, he didn’t!’ PRN

b.

c.

d.

e.

ASR

In affirmative clauses, the stress-bearing element is typically co´, since this is usually the only functional element below TP to the right of the verb-phrase (1a). However, in negative clauses and responsives, more options are available. In (1b) and (1f)---also in (31a)---for example, stress falls on negative không, or its stylistic variant chẳng (as in 31b), even when co´ is projected (1c, 1e).

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(31)

a.

261

Em sẽ

không [cưới anh (đâu)]! NOT marry PRN (where) ‘I will not marry you!’ Em và anh sẽ chẳng [hiểu được nhau]. PRN CONJ PRN FUT NOT understand can each.other ‘You and I will not be able to understand each other.’ PRN

b.

FUT

If one temporarily sets aside (30a)---emphatic do in affirmative declaratives, which follows from the movement analysis presented at the outset---all of the data presented thus far in both English and Vietnamese can be accounted for by the following generalization: contrastive intonation initially targets (the left edge of) PolP and spreads rightward to the first available lexical host. As it turns out, this generalization quite consistent with the analysis of emphatic interrogatives given in (8) above and repeated here in modified form as (32a); (32b) schematizes the Vietnamese version: (32)

a.TP XP

T T

didn’t

PolP

initial target of contrastive intonation

Pol

Spec

not Pol too so didn’t

AsrP Asr

VP

did b. TP XP

T T

PolP

sẽ Spec

initial target of contrastive intonation

Pol’

chú Pol

AsrP

không

Asr

VP

có This analysis also directly accounts for stress placement involving the multifunctional particle đâu (‘at all’): (33)

a.

b.

Ông đâu

đến!23 PRN WHERE ASR come ‘He did not show up!’ (not ‘Where did he show up?’) Bà đâu co´ phải là nguời Hành-thiện!24 PRN WHERE ASR right COP person Hanh-Thien ‘She is not a native of Hanh Thien, I tell you!’ co´

Examples in (33) are taken from Nguyeˆ ̃n, Đ.H., (1990: 59). (Bare) assertion co´ cannot co-occur directly with the identificational copula là: (33b) illustrates the alternative construction involving the modal particle phải. See Duffield (in prep.) for further discussion. Given the distribution of modal auxiliaries---discussed in the final section of this paper--there is no reason to suppose that co´ in (33b) is not otherwise identical to assertion co´ in the other examples discussed to this point. 23 24

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The distribution and interpretation of đâu in the examples in (33) contrasts directly with those in (34) below, which show that đâu is obligatorily interpreted as a locative wh-expression ( English ‘where’) in its canonical post-verbal position, at least with predicates that select locative arguments: (34)

a.

b.

Anh đi đâu? PRN go where ‘Where are you going?’ Tôi không biết em ở đâu? I NEG know PRN be.LOC where ‘I don’t know where you are.’

In emphatic contexts however, đâu functions as a reinforcing negative polarity item, equivalent to the English covert locative ‘at all’: typically, it appears pre-verbally in conjunction with co´, as in (33). There are two points to observe about these examples. First, as expected, it is đâu rather than co´ that bears emphatic stress. Second, notice that emphatic đâu is always interpreted negatively, even though không is unexpressed, and in spite of the fact that co´ otherwise has an affirmative reading in declarative clauses. The absence of the sentential negation marker không in contexts that are nevertheless interpreted as negative is consistent with the idea that emphatic đâu modifies---or is in construction with---a syntactic projection with negative features (i.e., PolP), rather than (with) a particular lexical item. Plausibly, it appears as a specifier of PolP, as is assumed to be the case for the reinforcing adverbials in English {too, so, not, never}: see (32a) above. The conclusion that emphatic đâu and không are structurally related is further supported by the fact that preverbal đâu and (sentential) không are in complementary distribution, as illustrated in (35ab) below. Notice that this restriction is purely syntactic: the alternants in (35 cd) show that đâu and emphatic không may co-occur just as long as đâu appears in its alternative, sentence-final, position25: (35)

a.

Ông (*không) đâu PRN

b.

c.

d.

NEG

WHERE

(co´) đến! ASR come

‘He did not show up!’ Ông (*đâu) không đến! PRN WHERE NEG ASR come ‘He did not show up!’ Ông không đến đâu! PRN NEG arrive where ‘He is not coming/did not come!’ (not ‘Where didn’t he go?’) Ông co´ đến đâu! PRN ASR come where ‘He did not show up!’ (not ‘Where didn’t he go?’)

The final set of data relevant to this analysis are emphatic declaratives involving the durative aspectual element đang, whose base position---it was postulated earlier---intervenes between PolP and AsrP. If contrastive intonation is uniquely a feature of PolP that spreads rightward to Asr---in (1a), for example---then the presence of đang should block this spreading to co´, in sentences such as those in (36) below. Conversely, in those apparently derived cases in which đang appears to the left of negative không, as in (37b) (cf. 18b above), đang should now appear too high to attract stress: (36)

a.

b.

Tôi biết là chị đang co´ yêu một I know COMP PRN PROG ASR love one ‘I know that she is in love with someone.’ No´ đang co´ no´i chuyện điện.thoa : i với PRN PROG ASR talk phone with ‘He is talking to someone over the phone.’

người. man ai đo´.26 who DEM

Notice that the complementary distribution of đâu and không in (35a) and (35b) does not follow directly from the analysis in (32b), in which không is represented as a head; some additional stipulation such as the ‘Doubly-Filled NegP’ filter (Robbers, 1992), is required to block their cooccurrence; see also Koopman (1997). It is, of course, possible that Vietnamese không is a represented as a specifier (like English not) rather than as a head: nothing in the present paper hangs crucially on this alternative (though see Duffield, 2013a). 26 Not all speakers allow đang and assertion co´ in the same clause, particularly with non-stative predicates (36b); for these speakers, the initial generalization holds. However, for those speakers that do accept these sentences, stress placement is as indicated, hence contrary to what the generalization predicts. 25

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a.

b.

263

Tôi không đang a˘ n cơm. PRN NEG ASP eat rice ‘I am not having a meal.’ Tôi đang không a˘ n cơm. PRN ASP NEG eat rice ‘I am not having a meal.’

Unfortunately, neither of these predictions is borne out: co´ still receives stress in (36), while preposed đang receives stress in (37b). While it is possible to account for the latter effect either by assuming (i) that đang is adjoined by a late restructuring rule to the left edge of PolP,27 or (ii), that không is lowered by a similar rule prior to the assignment of stress, neither of these possible solutions can account for the apparent ‘invisibility’ of đang in (36). The only conclusion from (36) that preserves the rest of the analysis of Vietnamese phrase-structure is that emphasis can apply either to PolP, as proposed above, or---where this projection is phonetically void---to AsrP directly. In other words, Vietnamese disposes of two separate projections for emphasis: PolP and AsrP---just like Catalan, in the analysis proposed by Battlori and Hernanz (2011), discussed at the outset (cf. 10 above). Supposing this analysis of intonation to be on the right track, two conclusions can be drawn. The first, which addresses the first question in the introduction (‘what is being emphasized?’), is that contrastive intonation targets two separate projections below IP: a Polarity Phrase, bearing semantically-interpreted features of truth-value---this is ‘‘polarity emphasis’’; an independent projection in which (polarity-independent) assertion features are realized (‘‘assertion emphasis’’). The second conclusion, if emphasis and assertion are structurally dissociated from each other, as well as from Tense, is that there are not two, but three, components of finiteness (Tense, Polarity and Assertion), each with its own set of syntactic projections. Hence, Klein’s proposal only marks the beginning of the fractionation of finiteness. 4.3. Dissociating polarity and assertion: evidence from Yes-No questions Further evidence that emphasis and assertion are structurally dissociated---albeit the evidence is derived from theoretical analysis, rather than from raw distributional facts---is provided by the treatment of Yes-No questions in Vietnamese proposed in Duffield (2013a). As illustrated in (38), Yes-No questions are formed by means of two ‘brace constructions’: the first, default, construction involves medial co´ with the negation morpheme không placed phrasefinally (38a)---repeated from (1c) above; alternatively, in perfect Yes-No questions, the brace involves the aspectual morpheme đã and the negation morpheme chưa (‘(not) yet’), again placed finally, as shown in (38b). The main interpretive difference between the two constructions is that questions with final không merely ask about the truth of the proposition, whereas those with final chưa ask whether the event or state of affairs denoted by the proposition has yet been realized: (38)

a.

Chị (*đã) co´

mua cái nhà không? buy CL house NEG ‘Did you (elder sister) buy (the) house?’ Con đã (*co´) uống thuốc chưa? PRN ANT ASR drink medicine not.yet ‘Have you (child) taken your medicine yet?’ PRN

b.

PAST

ASR

A significant point to observe is that in this context co´ is not interpreted as an assertion morpheme, any more than auxiliary do is interpreted as expressing assertion in English interrogatives; instead, like do, it bears [+Q]-features. Notice also that, in contrast to declaratives (18), đã and co´ are mutually exclusive in Yes-No questions: đã only occurs with perfect chưa, co´ only occurs with không. Vietnamese Yes-No questions display a number of other interesting collocational restrictions when compared either with their wh-counterparts, or with the corresponding tag-questions, which suggest a more complex derivational history. These include the impossibility of negative Yes-No questions, exemplified in (39), as well as the incompatibility of final không/chưa with pre-verbal topic and/or (future) tense markers, illustrated in (40a) and (40b), respectively:

27

Cf. Ouhalla (1990).

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N. Duffield / Lingua 137 (2013) 248--270

a.

*Anh a´ˆ y

không đến không? NEG come NEG ‘Isn’t he coming?’ *Con chưa uống thuốc chưa? PRN not.yet drink medicine not.yet ‘Haven’t you [child] taken your medicine yet?’ PRN

b.

(40)

a.

b.

DEM

*Xã bên thì ruộng tốt không? village side TM rice field good NEG (As for) the neighboring village, are its rice-fields good (fertile)?’ *Vợ anh sẽ (co´) làm việc ỏ Paris không? wife PRN FUT ASR work be.LOC Paris NEG ‘Will your wife work in Paris?’

By contrast, the following examples show the full acceptability of these constituent orders in true tag-questions ((co´) phải không, ‘isn’t it’), such as those in (41)--(42): (41)

a.

Anh aˆ´ y

không đến, (co´) phải không? NEG come ASR right NEG ‘He isn’t coming, is he?’ Con chưa uống thuốc, (co´) phải không? PRN not.yet drink medicine ASR right NEG ‘You [child] haven’t yet taken your medicine, have you?’ PRN

b.

(42)

a.

b.

DEM

?Xã bên thì ruộng tốt, (co´) phải không? village side TM rice field good ASR right NEG ‘(As for) the neighboring village, its rice-fields are good (fertile), aren’t they?’ Vợ anh sẽ làm việc ỏ Paris, (co´) phải không? wife PRN FUT work be.LOC Paris ASR right NEG ‘Your wife will (indeed) work in Paris, won’t she?’

The sentence-final position of the interrogative/negative elements không is also unexpected, given the strict head-initiality of Vietnamese phrase-structure in other contexts. In Duffield (2013a), it is claimed that all of these effects---the [+Q] interpretation of co´, the co-occurrence restrictions, and the final position of không/chưa---follow directly from a Kaynian predicate-raising analysis (Kayne, 1994). Under this analysis, negative and interrogative không are treated not as mere homophones, but as formally and structurally identical: không is uniformly merged above the predicate-phrase; its surface position is derived by raising the predicate phrase (vP)---together with any associated functional categories subjacent to NegP, including AspP and AsrP---around this functional head, as schematized in (43) (PolP now substituting for NegP in the original analysis): (43)

a. b.

[Chị co´ mua cái nhà [PolP không [AsrP chị co´ [vP chị mua cái nhà?]]]] [Con đã uống thuốc [PolP chưa [AspP con đã [vP con uống thuốc?]]]]

Clearly, this analysis is controversial.28 If it turns out to be correct however, the conclusion must be that negation and assertion are structurally distinct---otherwise, the phrase containing co´/đã could not move around the Polarity head, as the analysis requires. 4.4. Interim summary The findings to this point may be briefly summarized. First, detailed distributional evidence has been offered to show that Vietnamese co´ is initially projected below Tense, Aspect and (sentential) Negation. Second, a close examination of the distribution of contrastive intonation in Vietnamese suggests that polarity emphasis is only

28 The analysis schematized in (43) is adapted from Duffield (2013a). It is now unclear to me that the landing site of this phrasal movement is the [Spec] position of NegP (PolP), as originally proposed. For present purposes, however, the analysis is sufficient to show that features of polarity and assertion occupy distinct structural positions.

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contingently related to assertion co´; this conclusion is supported by the availability and interpretation of unstressed co´ in declarative contexts (where it exhibits direct parallels with unstressed do in alternative varieties of English). Finally, the position and interpretation of co´ in Yes-No questions, where it lexicalizes [+Q], rather than assertion, features---once again, in parallel with the fronted position and interpretation of auxiliary do---implies that assertion features are but one of a set of illocutionary/modal features initially projected low in the clausal phrase-structure, below polarity. 5. Assertion, mood and illocutionary force 5.1. Imperative structures With respect to the final point made in the previous section, it is interesting that the empirical conclusion that assertion is linked to other illocutionary values in Vietnamese directly reflects Klein’s theoretical conjecture regarding assertion. In his (1998) paper, Klein notes: ‘It is plausible to assume that tense only marks that some arbitrary time span, for which we keep the term TT, placed somewhere on the time axis, and that either [Asr] or, depending on the particular illocution, some other ‘‘modality marker’’ assigns a special function to this time span. So, TT can be the time span for which a claim is made, but it can also be the time span at which some obligation is put into force (or in whichever way we want to analyze the role of the imperative) [emphasis mine].’ The expectation, then, is that alongside exponents of [+Q] and assertion features, imperatives should occupy the same low position in Vietnamese. As the following examples illustrate, this prediction is borne out: both affirmative (hãy, cứ) and negative (đừng, chớ) imperatives appear sentence-medially. The contrast between the examples in (44) and their unacceptable counterparts in (45) clearly shows that imperatives are placed to the right of the optional subject DP, hence---at least---below TP: (44)

a.

b.

c.

(45)

a. b. c.

(Các anh) hãy đọc bài này! PL PRN IMP read lesson DEM1 ‘Read this text!’ (Anh) cứ hỏi! PRN IMP ask ‘Go ahead. Ask! (Anh) đừng no´i to´! (PRN) NEG.IMP talk loud ‘Don’t speak loudly!’ *Hãy các anh đọc bài này. *Cứ anh hỏi. *Đừng anh no´i to´!

Consider now the examples in (46)---which are otherwise identical to those in (45), but with emphatic co´ inserted. The first two examples, in (46a) and (46b), show that that co´ is in complementary distribution with the affirmative imperative morphemes (hãy, cứ), something that follows directly if these elements compete for the same structural position; however, as (46c) shows, co´ remains perfectly compatible with the negative forms (chớ, đừng). (The parallels with emphatic negative assertion discussed earlier and exemplified in (34)-(34) above, should be obvious). (46)

a.

*Các anh hãy co´ PL

b.

c.

PRN

IMP

ASR

đọc bài này. read lesson DEM1

‘Read this text!’ *Anh cứ co´ hỏi. PRN IMP ASR ask ‘Go ahead. Ask!’ (Anh) đừng/chớ co´ no´i to´! prn neg.imp asr talk loud ‘Don’t speak loudly!’

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Interpretively, the examples in (46) can be compared with emphatic imperatives in English involving auxiliary do, illustrated in (47): (47)

a. b. c.

(Do) try to pay attention!29  Try to pay attention! (Do) eat up your vegetables!  Eat up your vegetables! (Don’t) try to breathe  Try not to breathe!

The alternants without do in (47) demonstrate also that---in contrast to their tensed counterparts---imperative lexical verbs are able to undergo verb-raising to C in English (presumably moving through the Asr and T nodes in transit). That imperative verbs raise past the subject position {Spec, TP} is evidenced in varieties such as Belfast English, in which subject pronouns are overt in imperatives, as in (48) below, while the examples in (49) and (50), from archaic and poetic registers, show that---at the very least---imperative verbs raise past negation, alternating with do-support in normal spoken registers. (These examples indicate clearly that it is not thematic lexical verbs per se that are prevented from crossing negation in English, but only those with tense features [tense]). (48) (49)

a. b. a. b. c.

Sit you down there! [Belfast English] *You sit down there! [Belfast English] Ask not for whom the bell tolls. . . (John Donne). Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country (John F Kennedy). Fear not the future, for it doesn’t exist and never shall (Christopher Paolini).30

As was the case previously with respect to polarity emphasis, the various parallels between English and Vietnamese imperatives noted above can be accounted for directly in terms of a common underlying phrase-structure, with the contrasts explained in terms of the scope of overt movement: in (50) below, AsrP is re-labeled Mood Phrase, reflecting its more comprehensive feature-set {interrogative, declarative, imperative,}:

(50)

CP C | e e Do Try

TP DP | Các anh Anh e e

T’ T | e e do try

PolP Spec | e Pol | đừng (not) e e (not) do try

Pol MoodP Mood | hãy có do try

vP đoc bài này! nói tó try to breathe! try to breathe!

(Các anh) hãy đọc bài này! (45a) (Anh) đừng/chớ co´ no´i to´! (46c) Do not try to breathe (49c) Try not to breathe (49c)

29 Emphatic imperatives such as those in (47) are restricted to particular speech styles and registers---Mary Poppins comes to mind---but they are certainly grammatically acceptable. 30 The Paolini quote (49c) is especially interesting in that it shows that contemporary writers, aping earlier models, readily invert imperatives around negation, but still invoke do-support for declaratives: note ‘doesn’t exist’ not ‘exists not’. It seems unlikely that Paolini would have written ‘exists not’ (or that his readers would have accepted this). Notice also that never always precedes imperatives, even when not follows (Fear not! cf. Never fear!).

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The data from imperative constructions thus reinforce the previous conclusions, derived from an examination of Yes-No questions, namely, that negation is structurally dissociated from assertion, and that assertion is but one feature of Mood. The final question---the last piece of the cartographic puzzle---is how broad-ranging this category might be: specifically, whether Mood also includes modal auxiliaries, which is the only set of functional categories in Vietnamese that have not been discussed to this point. From an English perspective, the position of deontic modals such as nên (‘should’) and phải (‘must) is quite surprising, given the remarkably close parallels between English and Vietnamese functional categories that have been documented so far: in stark contrast to English, in which these modals are invariably the highest functional category in a auxiliary string (51), in Vietnamese, they are the lowest.31 (51)

a. b. c. d. e. f.

*He does/did could/should/might leave. He may/should/can (not) leave. He may/should/can not have left. *He has (not) may/should/can left. He has (not) *can/been able to come. She will (not) *must/have to meet them.

By contrast, the Vietnamese examples in (52) show that deontic nên obligatorily appears to the right of Tense, Perfect and Progressive Aspect, and sentential Negation: (52)

a.

b.

c.

d.

Tôi (*nên) sẽ (nên) làm gì nếu bị sa thải? PRN should FUT should do what if PASS fire ‘What should I do if I get fired?’ Lẽ ra lúc này họ (*nên) đã (nên) đi rồi. right out when DEM PRN should ANT should go already ‘He (should) have left already.’ Lẽ ra lúc này mình (?nên) đang (nên) làm một thứ gì đo´. right out time DEM PRN should DUR should do one thing what DEM ‘I should have been doing something at the moment/by now.’ Những ai yêu bo´ng.đá thì (*nên) không (nên) bỏ lỡ clip này. several who love football TM should NEG should miss clip DEM1 ‘Those who love football, (they) should not miss this clip.’

These distributions would be consistent with the idea that modal auxiliaries also occupy the head of Mood in (50) above, were it not for the fact that nên is perfectly compatible with [+Q] co´. This is evidenced by the examples in (53)32: even more strikingly, nên can co-occur with the affirmative imperative morphemes hãy/cứ, as in (54a). (53)

a.

b.

Em co´ nên mua Audi A4 2010 không a : ? PRN [+Q] should buy Audi A4 2010 NEG EXCL ‘Should I buy a 2010 Audi A4?’ Em co´ nên bỏ chồng không? PRN [+Q] should leave husband NEG ‘Should I leave my husband?’

31

There are, however, well-reasoned arguments to support the idea that modal auxiliaries are initially projected below negation in both languages, and that the pre-negation position of modals in Modern English the result of auxiliary raising to T in the absence of a finite tense auxiliary (see, for example, Pollock 1989, Lightfoot & Hornstein 1994). Some of the most direct evidence for this is offered by the complementary distribution of modals with tense auxiliaries in Modern English, as in (51ef), as well as by the facts of n’t encliticisation, discussed at the outset. This analysis is further supported by the fact that non-finite modals appear below tense and negation in those other Germanic varieties that permit them: cf. the German examples in (i): (i) a.

Er hat [nicht [kommen können]] he has NEG come can ‘He has not been able to come.’ b. Sie wird sie [nicht [treffen müssen]]. she will them NEG meet must ‘She won’t have to meet them.’ 32 Internet sources: (53a), http://www.otofun.net/threads/420707-em-co-nen-mua-audi-a4-2010-khong-a (accessed 9/9/13); (53b) http://www. webtretho.com/forum/f188/em-co-nen-bo-chong-khong-lam-on-cho-em-loi-khuyen-1574118/.

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(54)

Hãy/ Cứ nên nghe.lời no´. IMP/ IMP should listen PRN ‘(You) should listen to him!’ Đừng/Chớ nên nghe.lời no´. NEG.IMP should listen PRN ‘*(You) shouldn’t listen to him!’

a.

b.

If, as has just been argued, [+Q] co´ and hãy are exponents of the Mood head, then the appearance of nên to the right of these elements seems to force the conclusion that Modality and Mood are distinct functional categories (unless Mood, like Outer Aspect above, is split into several sub-projections). This is schematized in the final, summative, diagram in (55), which maps out the entire functional architecture of the Vietnamese pre-verbal domain33:

(55)

TP

XP

T’ T | se~

PolP

Pol AspP1 | không Asp1 AspP2 đừng | Mood (đã) Asp2 | đang Mood Modality | có Mod hãy | nên phải

6. Summary In this paper, I have presented data in support of three empirical claims concerning the syntax of polarity emphasis in Vietnamese. First, I have offered new evidence supporting Klein’s (1998) arguments for a decomposition of Finiteness into at least two components, Tense and Assertion (Validity): it has been shown that these elements are represented independently in Vietnamese clause-structure, with assertion projected rather low, immediately to the left of the predicatephrase, below all other functional categories (except Mood). Next, various kinds of distributional data---including data from Vietnamese Yes-No questions (Duffield, 2013a)---have been presented to show that sentential negation, and other polarity elements, occupy a separate, and higher, structural position than those of assertion, here labeled polarity phrase. The third claim advanced here is that this low structural position hosts all other illocutionary (force) features in Vietnamese---notwithstanding the evidence of Romance and Germanic languages, which seem to support a much higher position for such features---namely, ForceP---on the left periphery; this claim is supported by evidence from imperative, interrogative and modal constructions. Finally, the obvious structural and interpretive parallels between Vietnamese co´ and English auxiliary do (particularly in earlier varieties of the language---as well as in current English Child Language) suggest that these findings may extend beyond Vietnamese, to English. The results of this investigation thus resurrect the idea, originally proposed in Chomsky (1957), that features of (emphatic) assertion, as well as other features of illocutionary force are initially associated with a low syntactic position: see also Cormack & Smith (2002). Of course, if this is correct for Vietnamese and for English, then Minimalist assumptions (especially, the Strong Uniformity Thesis, Boeckx, 2011) force the conclusion that it is correct more generally. The theoretical implication of this is clear: the appearance of illocutionary features in the C-domain in more familiar languages must be due to overt movement of the lexical elements hosting them, rather than to base-generation. Thus, the outcome of this empirical investigation of Vietnamese leads us to where we began, in theoretical terms: by tracing the derivational progress of auxiliary do back down the clausal spine of Vietnamese, we return to a proposal

33 The terminal elements in (55) serve only to illustrate the underlying position of functional categories: as has been discussed extensively above, collocational restrictions mean that not all of these elements can appear simultaneously in the same clause.

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