The projection of Inner Aspect in Vietnamese

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.


Introduction
In the theoretical literature on aspect, it is widely held that two kinds of aspect should be distinguished: grammatical aspect and lexical aspect.The former, also called viewpoint aspect, is concerned with the bounded/ unbounded distinction, and describes the temporal properties of the situation denoted by the verb phrase from the speaker's viewpoint.The latter, also called situation aspect, is concerned with the telic/atelic distinction and describes temporal properties that are inherent to the situation itself (Vendler  1957; Comrie 1976; Klein 1994; Smith 1997).For many syntacticians, viewpoint aspect is assumed to be realized as a functional category within the inflectional domain.It is much less clear whether situation aspect also has a position in phrase-structure, as it is rarely morphologically realized and its interpretation is dependent on other elements such as the type of the predicate J Journal of P Portuguese L Linguistics, 12-1 (2013), 41-62 ISSN 1645-4537 and the object complement.This paper argues that both aspectual categories are syntactically encoded in Vietnamese, though by different means.
A similar claim is made in Travis (2010) for Western Austronesian languages.Specifically, Travis proposes the following clause structure: From Travis (2010): The Cartography of Outer and Inner Aspect.
I will argue that Travis's proposal should be adopted for Vietnamese as well. 1 The crucial characteristic of her analysis is that there are two aspect heads in a clause.While viewpoint aspect (Asp) is sandwiched between these two VP shells, situation aspect (OAsp) takes scope over this entire event (EP).Because of their different position relative to the VP (VP-external vs. VP-internal), viewpoint aspect is referred to as "Outer Aspect" and situation aspect as "Inner Aspect" (cf.also Ramchand 2003; Borer 2005; MacDonald 1 See also Duffield (2011) for independent data, from analytic causative constructions, in support of this claim. (1) 2006; Nossalik 2009).Another significant implication of this approach is that telicity, i.e.Inner Aspect, is not determined by the inherent lexical property of the main verb alone, but also by other lexical elements contained within the verb phrase, including the object DP, as well as other independently projected postverbal particles.
A number of morphological devices in Vietnamese are generally considered to add aspectual meanings to the verb to which they are attached.These particles display rigid ordering and can be divided into two main groups based on their consistent distribution.Preverbal elements, consisting of the anterior morpheme đã and the progressive đang/đương, are usually independent of the timeline that includes the utterance time and serve to anchor the event time to a certain reference time.For this and other reasons, they are argued in Duffield and Phan (2010), to be manifestations of Outer Aspect (in the relational sense of Klein 1994), rather than Tense elements, as more traditionally supposed.Postverbal elements, by contrast, indicate whether the event reaches its endpoint, and are usually known as 'telic markers.'Although the distribution and interpretation of these elements pose intriguing problems, they have not been analyzed in any detail hitherto.It will be argued that these elements, which are the focus of the present paper, should best be understood as realizations of Inner Aspect in Vietnamese.
In the following sections, I will show how telicity is expressed in Vietnamese (section 2), and how telicity is encoded syntactically in this language, which matches well with the Travis's tree (section 3), and I will end with a speculation note on the internal structure of causative constructions, which might further support this tree.

Compositionality of telicity in Vietnamese
In Vietnamese, telicity is conditioned by different factors: the lexical semantics of the main verb; the presence of particles, the quantification of the direct object, and the type of verbal construction involved.Each of these will be examined in turn.
(2) a.It may be observed that these verbs are [-volitional]: that is to say, the subjects are not Agents, but Undergoers.This is clear from the examples in (2): in (2a), the bomb undergoes a change of state from not being blown up to being blown up, in (2b), the vase undergoes a change of state from not being broken to being broken, while in (2c) the speaker experiences a change in visual perception.All of these events take place without deliberate intention.In addition, 'xong' (literally means 'finish') in examples (3) functions not only as a telic marker, but also as a diagnostic of durativity. 3Their incompatibility with 'xong' also suggests that they are also punctual verbs.
Their lack of intentionality and durativity indicates that they are achievements -in Vendler's (1957) terminology.As these verbs are already specified as [+telic] in the lexicon, co-occurence with 'xong' results in some kind of redundancy which presumably leads to deviance.2.2.Aside from the small number of lexically telic verbs just exemplified in 2.1, telicity can be manipulated through the addition of a telic particle. 4These particles occur between the main verb and the direct object and serve to convert an atelic event into a telic one: (4) a. Chú bò tìm bạn Cls cow search friend 'The cow looked for his friend'.b.Chú bò tìm rabạn 5 Cls cow search out friend 'The cow found his friend'.
The particle ra literally means 'out': it normally bears a directional meaning, indicating that the object follows a path from within a contained space to some place outside that space: (5) Nó dắt ngựa ra.
PRN lead horse out 'He led the horse out' However, in (4b), the referent of the object does not involve such a movement in physical space.The interpretation of the particle 'ra' in this sentence is purely aspectual; that is, it contributes a connotation of 'culmination' (or 'completeness') to the event.
The first thing to note about their distribution is that telic particles are syntactically distinct from adverbs.Although both telic particles and the adverb rồi ('already') appear postverbally, the completive marker always precedes the adverb rồi.Even when there is position shift between the object DP and the completive particle, as in (6) below, rồi still stays at the right edge of the sentence: As can be seen in (6a), unlike the particle xong, the adverb rồi cannot intervene between the verb and the direct object.The same holds for other prototypical manner adverbs, such as từ từ ('gradually'); though they can normally occur quite freely in the sentence, they cannot be positioned between the verb and its noun complement: This characteristic is also shared by English adverbs, a commonality that is presumably due to the absence of finite verb-raising in the two languages.The fact that telic particles can appear in what is otherwise an opaque syntactic position therefore suggests that they deserve special treatment. 7hat is more, the interpretation of certain post-verbal particles is affected by their syntactic distribution.Duffield (1999), for instance, observes that the interpretation of the modal particle được ('can') varies depending on where it is initially merged in the clause.These examples illustrates that whereas preverbal được corresponds to the deontic modal CAN, and sentence-final được is interpreted as an abilitative modal, 8 positioning đươc immediately postverbally yields a purely aspectual (achievement) reading: the presence of được in (9c) assures the completion of the 'job-seeking' situation.
Another example of a multi-functional word is xong.The morpheme xong can either behave as a matrix predicate, in which case it means 'finish' as in (10), or as a telic particle somewhat akin to the telicizing particle 'up' in English.As a main predicate, 'xong' can merge with TP.As a telic particle, as in ( 11), xong places some restriction on the definiteness of the direct object.Although objects may be found either preceding or following the particle, there are semantic restrictions on preceding objects, namely, a fronted object may be definite or generic NP denoting theme, but it CANNOT be indefinite: the lexical verb in German raises cross the adverbs to a higher functional position.English and Vietnamese lexical verbs, on the other hand, do not move that high.Therefore, in a language that lacks verb movement to a position outside of the VP like Vietnamese, the position of the telic particles in sentences like (6b) is clearly of interest. 8To see how the sentence-final 'được' challenges Universalist constraints, the readers are referred to Duffield (1999).13) illustrate a three-way contrast: only if the object is definite can it freely precede or follow the particle as in (11); if it is bare kind-referring noun, it preferably precedes the particle as in (12); however, if it is indefinite noun phrase, it must appear to the right of the particle as in (13).
MacDonald (p.c.) observes that this restriction on direct objects due to the presence of 'extra' material in the VP is reminiscent of Slavic prefixes and English telicizing particles.For example, in Bulgarian, although the morphologically bare NP can generally be interpreted as either [+specific] or [-specific], the presence of some preverbs forces the [+specific] reading: (14) Toj na-pis-a pisma *3casa/za 3 casa He PV-write-3SG/ AORIST letters *for 3hours/in 3 hours 'He wrote letters in 3 hours' (Slabakova 2001: 89)   Thus, the definiteness requirement is well-attested cross-linguistically; (see also Diesing 1997) for Germanic languages, (Cheng and Sybesma 1999) for Chinese).What is crucial about these examples, however, is the observation that only objects preceding the particle are subject to definiteness constraints.This indicates that the verb-particle-object order is the unmarked order, while the verb-object-particle is derived as a result of leftward movement of the object.
In summary, the exact function and interpretation of xong varies depending on its position of 'xong' in phrase-structure:12 in a high position, it functions as a main verb (like English 'finish'), and can bear clausal tense; in a lower position internal to the VP, xong is a telic particle (like English 'up'), in close dependency with the direct object.
In brief, 'được' in (9c) and 'xong' in (11b) provide strong evidence for the existence of a syntactic position which is immediately below that occupied by the main verb, and which accommodates aspectual features.
A futher important point to notice concerning the distribution of telic particles is that they are restricted to co-occur with cerrtain kinds of predicate: they may combine with dynamic and durative predicates, or accomplishments, in Vendler's terminology, but not with stative or punctual verbs.It should be noted that verbs of creation and verbs of consumption have been reported in the literature to share the same attribute: their 'Incremental Theme object' ( (Tenny 1987; Slabakova 2008), amongst others).That is to say, the object can 'measure out' the event, in the sense that how much it comes into existence tell us how much complete the event is.As a result, examples of eventive predicates with 'Incremental Theme objects' have been paid much attention in the literature of telicity composition (e.g., (Pustejovsky 1991, Travis 2010).
2.3.Another factor that is also responsible for the telicity of the predicate in Vietnamese is the cardinality of the direct object.
It is well-known in the literature that in English, depending on the presence and the [+q] feature of the object, the predicate is telic or atelic.This phenomenon is usually referred to as the object-to-event-mapping (OTEM) 13 property (Verkuyl 1972; MacDonald 2010).Specifically, dynamic telic verbs and dynamic atelic verbs are marked as different partly because the objects of telic verbs are compulsory and 'quantity' (Verkuyl's terminology) (i.e., singular indefinites, definite, or numeral) while those of atelic verbs are optional and non-quantity (i.e., mass nouns or bare plurals).Examples in (18) illustrate that the existence of a quantity object always results in a dynamic telic events in English: As shown above, the [+q] feature of English DPs depends on other properties: definiteness and cardinality (Gavruseva 2008).
Vietnamese lacks articles even though it has its own way to designate definiteness (e.g., by demonstratives, some kinds of classifier, plurality, or other contextual factors), so the only obvious way to mark [+q] feature is cardinality.In Vietnamese, the event must be completed when the perfect accomplishment sentence includes a numeral object, but not when the object is a demonstrative noun phrase.
he eat-LE two-Cl cake/ that-Cl cake but not eat-finish 'He ate two cakes/that cake, but he did not finish them/it.' b.Ta kan-le #liang-ben shu/ na-ben shu, keshi mei kan-wan. he read-LE two-Cl book/that-Cl book but not read-finish 'He read two books/that book, but he did not finish them/it.' (Examples of Soh & Kuo 2005: 204)   That is to say, though it is not so strong as in English, but still to a certain extent, Vietnamese DPs do have effect on the aspectual interpretation of the predicate.The presence of 'sạch' (clean) and 'lên' (up) forces the telic reading of these sentences.
2.5.In conclusion, like many other languages, Vietnamese encodes telicity either lexically or syntactically.Factors that license telicity are found cross--linguistically.However, linguistic variation lies in which factor plays the most significant role and how the different factors interact.That is to say, all languages express telicity but they differ in how/where exactly telicity is syntactically projected in each language.It is also the locus of difference among hypotheses offered in the literature.For instance, the most well--studied pair of languages in the realm of Inner Aspect is English and Russian.The crucial difference between the two languages is that unlike in English, in Russian, it is not the internal argument, but the preverb that has final say in the aspectuality of the whole predicate, as can be seen in the example ( 14), repeated here for convinence, the predicate is interpreted as telic due to the presence of the preverb 'na', and regardless of the [-q] DP object: (14) Toj na-pis-a pisma *3 casa/za 3 casa he PV-write-3SG/AORIST letters *for 3 hours/in 3 hours He wrote letters in 3 hours.'(Slabakova 2001: 89)   To account for this language variation, Slabakova (2001) and Travis 14 (2010), argue that cross-linguistcally, telicity is encoded in different syntactic heads: this head could be located in the V 1 (or little v in other terminology systems) (such as in Russian) or in Asp (such as in English 15 and Malagasy), or in X (such as goal phrases in English and resultative predicates Chinese).
14 See Borer (2005), Nossalik (2009), MacDonald (2010) for alternative views.For instance, Borer (2005) and Nossalik (2009) argue that even though both English and Russian have the projection of Inner Aspect in their phrase structure, the two languages have different telicity assigning mechanism: English verbs acquire their telic value indirectly from the internal argument, while in Russian, Asp Q (equivalent to Travis's Asp) acquires its range directly from the preverbs.MacDonald (2010), on the other hand, explains this language variation by proposing that English and Russian actually have different phrase structure: English has the projection of Inner AspP in their phrase structure whereas Russian lacks of this projection. 15Actually, Travis (2010) argues that telicity in English is located in X, instead of in Asp as proposed by Slabakova (2001).However, the crucial point that remains the same in the two accounts is that Russian places telicity structurally higher than English.
(22) (Adopted from Travis 2010) The three possible positions in which event boundaries can be indicated are differentiated by Travis (2010) according to: (i) whether the telicity marker is a lexical (adjective or preposition), an inflectional (ASP) or a light verb head (V 1 ), (ii) whether it is in the Goal position setting up the endpoint of the event; or in the Aspect position determining a specific point of the event, or in the Process position of the event in which it can supply an arbitrary bound to the process, (iii) and most importantly, its relationship with the internal argument, i.e., whether its scope is above or below the event measuring DP.
At first glance, Vietnamese seems to be in common with Russian in marking telicity morphologically overtly for the most part, as indicated in section 2.2; and also share with English in the role of the internal argument in the computation of telicity as shown in section 2.3 The question is if we assume that telicity can be marked in three positions in the tree, namely V1, Asp, X under which functional head does Vietnamese place telicity.

Syntactic projection of telicity in Vietnamese
The aim of the paper is to claim that telic particles in Vietnamese head the Inner Asp phrase, which appears between V 1 P and V 2 P. Their syntactic position in the phrase structure is argued to be determined by their interaction with the main verb and with the internal argument.
The verb and the telic particles appear to form a single unit.Together they thematically license both the internal argument and the external argument.For instance, in the examples (9c), repeated here for convenience: (9c) Cô ấy kiếm được việc PRN DEM seek obtain job 'She found a job' 'cô ấy' (she) is understood as the subject of the complex verb-particle 'kiếm được' (seek obtain); and also 'việc' (job) is interpreted as the object of the complex.That is to say, the particle on its own is not predicated of the object. 16In this sentence, the particle 'được' (obtain) says nothing about the properties of the object 'việc' (job) 17 .However, the main verb-particle complex can be separated by the object, which result in two alternative word orders: (23) a. Nó làm xong bài rồi V-particle-object PRN do finish exercise already 'He has done the exercises.'/'He finished doing the exercises.'b.Nó làm bài xong rồi V-object-particle PRN do exercise finish already 'He has done the exercises.'/'He finished doing the exercises.'Structurally, telic particles are argued to dominate VP for they change the interpretation of the whole predicate by adding telicity to atelic events, as seen in the contrast between (4a) and (4b), repeated here: (4) a. Chú bò tìm bạn Cls cow search friend ' The cow looked for his friend'.b.Chú bò tìm ra bạn.
Cls cow search out friend 'The cow found his friend'.
In brief, the unity, and the autonomy, and the hierarchy between the telic particles and the main verb are those characteristics that are of importance in determining their syntactic positions and need to be taken into consideration in any studies.
To account for this relationship, (Fukuda 2007) proposes that telic particles head a XP projection above VP, and the word order derived via movement of the main verb to a functional projection yet higher than the projection of telic particles: (24) Furthermore, Fukuda clearly spells out that that XP projection is Inner Aspect, following Travis: (25) (Fukuda 2007)   Proposing that telic particles head their own phrase, which is immediately above VP, nicely captures the autonomy and the hierarchy between the particles and the main verb discussed above.However, as Fukuda admitted, his study leaves unexplained the question of how the main verb moves from V 1 to V 2 (or V to v in other terminology systems) via Asp without violating Head Movement Constraints (Travis 1984), given that the main verb must move from V 1 to V 2 for theta role assigning purposes.
I will present a proposal adapted from Nicol (2002)'s Extended VP-Shell Hypothesis, which not only offers a mechanism of head movement inside the VPs, but also allows the two word orders shown in (23) to derive.
According to Nicol, there is a head inside the VP shells under which the particles might get inserted (w in his word, equivalent to Asp in Travis's terms).Furthermore, particles have the formal feature of either [+verbal] or [+nominal], which need to be checked during the derivation.This is empirically aided by the fact that English particles can be nominalized or verbalized, as indicated by the following examples: (26) a.They were bewildered at the ups and downs of the NASDAQ.
b.We upped the ante.c.He downed the whole bottle.(Nicol 2002:168)   Similarly, Vietnamese particles are originally verbs, and also are able to undergo the nominalization process by appearing after classifiers: (27) a. Cuối cùng anh cũng được thư nhà.
Finally PRN also obtain mail home 'He finally got a mail from home.' b.Nó mất mẹ từ khi còn nhỏ.
PRN must consider all CLS obtain and CLS lose before when give out decision 'They have to consider all the pros and cons before making a decision'.
It is assumed that the verbal feature of the particles motivates V 1 -to-Asp raising, and the nominal feature of the particles attracts nominals to its specifier.Accordingly, the verb-particle-object order derives as a result of particle insertion with the verbal checking feature: the particle is inserted under Asp with the feature [+verbal], V 1 is triggered to move to Asp, erasing the formal feature; then the [V 1 + particle] complex raises to V 2 . 18On the other hand, the verb-object-particle order derives when the particle is inserted with the feature [+nominal], motivating the direct object raise to [Spec,  AspP] to erase the checking feature; then V 1 moves to V 2 in one step, and hence we get the right order.

Immediate consequence
Projecting an intermediate VP-internal functional head helps shed some light on the thematic hierarchy of the complex causative constructions in Vietnamese.Specifically, the complex causative constructions exhibit a three-way thematic contrast of VP-internal arguments (instead of the standard 18 See Koizumi (1995) for a similar proposal.twofold classification Agent vs. Theme): Intentional Cause (prototypical Agent) > Non-intentional Cause > Theme, in which Non-intentional Causes are projected independently, and structurally lower than 'Intentional Causers', but higher than Theme, thus, are argued to occupy the specifier position of a functional head which is layered between V 1 P and V 2 P (adopted from Duffield 2011).Let's unpack these claims.
PRN break CLS glass (already) 'I broke the glass' (Examples of Duffield 2011) The 'làm' causative constructions are argued to be mono-clausal in terms of binding domain as well as other syntactic diagnostics (Kwon 2004;  Duffield 2011).What really interests us is that the 'làm' causative constructions display several contrastive facts due to the unaccusativity of the V 2 predicate.The first remarkable contrast is that the non-controlled unaccusative V 2 predicates are much more well-formed than the controlled unergative V 2 ones in the constructions (as shown in the difference between (30a) and (30b).Only with the addition of another predicate 'cho' (literally means: give), the unergative causatives become perfectly acceptable (as illustrated in the contrast between (30b) and 30c): Secondly, some core unaccusative predicates are allowed to precede the DP 2 , furthermore, it is clearly preferred than the non-inverted order; in sentences involving typical unergative predicates, on the other hand, the inverted order is completely forbidden: These examples together show a three-way contrast of thematic relations of VP's arguments: Intentional causes (or Agent) are excluded from the 'làm' causatives (as shown in the marginal acceptability of (30b)); only arguments interpreted as non-Agent (non-intentional Cause and Theme) can be licensed (as illustrated in (30a) and (31b)), in which a true Theme is merged lowest in the structure (as indicated in (31a)).
In brief, what is drawn from all of the Vietnamese data above is that the non-intentional cause is a syntactically independent argument, which is merged in a lower position than Agent, but higher than Theme.Proceeding from the assumption that different thematic roles are generated under different but strictly ordered specifier positions and different shells are created in order to house extra theta-positions (Larson 1988, Nicol 2002), we need (at least) one functional head sandwiched between V 1 P and V 2 P to host the Non-intentional Cause argument in the structure.It is exactly what the projection of Inner Aspect offers us, as shown in the following Travis's tree: (Cited in Duffield 2011)   The ungrammaticality of (30b), therefore, results from the inability to license Agents, whose base position -[Spec, V 1 ] -is too high in the structure.The above fact in Vietnamese is compatible with the widely-held assumption that External argument20 (which is usually Causer or Iniatior theta-role wise) is too structurally high to participate in the computation of Inner Aspect (Travis, 2010; MacDonald 2010).The predicates are telic regardless of the [-q] feature of the external argument NP: To sum up, the realization of Inner Aspect in Vietnamese helps to bring verb-particle constructions and complex causatives pattern together.They are generally considered as 'aspect-related constructions' (Slabakova 2001), which are doubtless of empirical interest when applying into second language acquisition to see whether or not they are related manifestations of the same parameter value. 21utting these observations together, the paper argues that Inner aspect is syntactically represented in Vietnamese, therefore support the viewpoint that Outer Aspect and Inner Aspect are independent aspectual components and encoded in the syntax differently.

(
18) a. Arthur planted [a protective circle of mushrooms] around the house in one day Singular indefinite Telic b.Edmund ate [the box of Turkish Delights that the Queen gave him] in 5 minutes Singular definite Telic c. Susan read [the engravings on the door] in 2 minutes Plural definite Telic 13 It is also important to bear in mind that OTEM is different from incrementality.As MacDonald (2010) observed, achievement verbs do not take incremental objects but they do exhibit the OTEM property.For instance: (a) John dropped the book #for ten minutes.(b) John dropped paper for 10 minutes.(Examples of MacDonald 2010) The grammaticality difference between (a) and (b), (a) is ill-formed on a single event interpretation while (b) is not, results from the difference between the [+q]NP the book and the [-q]NP paper.d.The magician produced [two maps of Narnia] in an instant N u m e r a l T e l i c (Examples of Nossalik 2009: 33)

2. 4 .
Telicity is also triggered by other factors such as the resultant secondary verb in resultative constructions, or the path-goal PP in motion verb constructions.(21) a. Tôi lau sạch mọi thứ rồi PRN ANT wipe clean every thing already 'I wiped everything clean.' b.Con mèo nhảy lên giường.CLS cat jump up bed 'The cat jumped up on (my) bed.'

(
33) a. Wildlife ate the bag of trash in ten minutes/#for ten minutes.b.Livestock pushed the cart into the barn in/#for ten minutes.(Examples of MacDonald 2010: 74)