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.