Journal of Portuguese Linguistics (Jun 2013)
The projection of Inner Aspect in Vietnamese
Abstract
Several semantic and syntactic distinctions, which have largely been neglected in the Vietnamese linguistic literature, are drawn together in this paper in a comparative context with other better-studied languages in order to indicate that Inner Aspect is projected within the VP shell and independently of the projection of Outer Aspect – a structural proposal originally advanced by Travis (2010). Overall, Vietnamese with its isolating character and rigid word order provides us with unusually direct evidence for an articulated VP structure.
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