Decomposing Definiteness in Vietnamese

dc.contributor.authorTrang, Phan
dc.contributor.authorLam, Quang Dong
dc.date.accessioned2021-02-03T18:37:03Z
dc.date.available2021-02-03T18:37:03Z
dc.date.issued2021-02-03
dc.description.abstractThis paper provides a detailed description of how Vietnamese encodes definiteness in the nominal phrase in the context of the crosslinguistic debate about the existence of lexical articles in classifier languages. We first show that so-called lexical determiners in Vietnamese are not genuine articles in the technical sense. We then scrutinize six different referring expressions in Vietnamese including bare nouns, classifier – nouns, numeral – classifier – nouns, plural – classifier – nouns, focus cái – classifier – nouns while pointing out how Vietnamese differs from other better-studied classifier languages. Based on this thorough investigation, we posit that Vietnamese systematically differentiates six levels of the givenness hierarchy in the sense of Gundel et al. (1993); therefore, Vietnamese contributes to a better understanding of the nature of definiteness and the structure of the nominal phrase.
dc.format.extent18 pages
dc.identifier.issn1836-6821
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10524/52476
dc.subjectdefiniteness
dc.subjectplural
dc.subjectclassifier
dc.subjectnumeral
dc.subjectbare noun
dc.subjectVietnamese
dc.subject.languagecodevie
dc.titleDecomposing Definiteness in Vietnamese
dc.typeArticle
dc.type.dcmiText
prism.endingpage18
prism.number1
prism.publicationnameJournal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society
prism.startingpage1
prism.volume14

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