Whys and Wherefores: the Aetiology of the Left Periphery (with reference to Vietnamese)
Nigel Duffield
January 2025
 

This paper offers a detailed description of the left periphery of embedded clauses in Vietnamese. Five kinds of pre-subject constituent are considered in isolation, and in interaction with one another: subordinating conjunctions; embedded topics; fronted quantifier expressions; fronted adverbials, and the Vietnamese equivalent of English why (Italian perché). A systematic comparison is made with the functional sequence of Italian, as proposed by Rizzi & Bocci (2017). Whilst largely consistent with the Italian pattern, our findings diverge in certain respects, esp. suggesting a modification of previous treatments of the *’why-to’ constraint (Shlonsky & Soare 2011).
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008766
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: submitted to Languages (special issue)
keywords: vietnamese syntax; ‘left periphery’; complementation; embedded topi-calization; ‘wh-questions’; ‘why’-questions; scope and constituency; cartographic approaches., syntax
previous versions: v2 [January 2025]
v1 [January 2025]
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