Polarity Emphasis and ‘Low Modality’ in Vietnamese and English

This is a pre-final draft of a paper presented at GIST4 (Workshop on Polarity Emphasis) in Ghent. The paper is a revised and refocussed version of my Linguistics article (Duffield 2007), incorporating findings from some more recent work (Duffield & Phan 2010, Duffield, in press). Comments welcome.

Link to pdf file

"Tomorrow, after we got on the boat ..." (Past morphology as anterior))

Recently, I've been posting some of Julian's more interesting grammatical misanalyses. Most of them have been lexical, but the one that I've noticed recently is syntactic and really quite frequent. Julian's 5;2 now, and typically adult-like by most measures, except for some lexical misanalyses, and morphological overgeneralizations of various kinds, especially perfective/passive.

He generally has control of past/non-past and can correctly distinguish preterite/present perfect in production of main clauses. All the more surprising then that he uses preterite forms in adverbial clauses to designate future perfect. So, for example:

"Tomorrow, after we came back from the doctors, can we go on our bikes?"
"Next week, when we got back from Ireland, can I play with Isaac?"

As far as I can judge, all when-(before/after/as soon as) clauses with future reference, where the topic time is further in the future—i.e. future perfect clauses—contain a preterite form.

(This is just like Vietnamese anterior da, except of course, that Julian does not speak or hear Vietnamese. It's not a feature of his other L1 (Japanese), either)

If anyone has similar data, perhaps you could let me know.

Why Shakespeare is wrong about Love

This is a cross-posting of two pieces I posted on the Family blog Devenish, which is now suspended. When I started regular posts on Devenish last year, I wasn't quite sure what the project was. I think I know now: this is part of it.]

...And jealousy, Time and infinite longing. So nothing serious, then. Click to play. 

Let’s start with Shakespeare and me. First, the words of one of his most famous sonnets, which I now recall was read at our wedding ceremony…

Why can't we talk to each other?: Why can't we listen?

In a very thoughtful review of Fritz Newmeyer's Language Form and Language Function, Martin Haspelmath (2000) poses the (partially rhetorical) question Why can't we talk to each other? which is also the title of the piece. The "we" in question are formalists* and functionalists, who—despite the best efforts of linguists like Newmeyer and Haspelmath—seem locked in a Middle East-style conflict without compromise or meaningful concession. One of the reasons for non-talking, Haspelmath proposes, is that our fundamental goals are incompatible. This may be so, but I think there is a simpler explanation: a conversation requires listeners as well as talkers, and we just don't listen.

Let me climb off the fence for a change, to make clear which kind of non-listening I'm referring to.

Do Asians really think differently from Westerners? - Revised Version

Link to PDF file


This is the revised draft version of the article on Asian-Western differences in visual recall, which has been resubmitted to Cognitive Linguistics. It should be cited as Tajima, Y. & N. Duffield (2011) On Japanese-Chinese differences in picture description and recall. Ms. Keio University and University of Sheffield. Submitted.

Head-First: On the head-initiality of Vietnamese clauses

Link to PDF file


This is the final draft version of an article on CP and 'Yes-No' questions in Vietnamese that will appear in 2012 in a Mouton volume edited by Daniel Hole and Elisabeth Löbel on the Linguistics of Vietnamese [title forthcoming]. This paper will form the basis of section 1 of Chapter 3 of my forthcoming monograph. This version should be cited as Duffield, Nigel (2011) Head-First: On the head-initiality of Vietnamese clauses, ms. University of Sheffield.

How flabbergasting is Extragrammaticality?

Recently, I have been forced to think a bit harder about the concept of Extra-grammaticality, which is basically the idea that some elements of a linguistic utterance are not analyzed as part of the abstract, underlying sentential representation (even if they are legitimate lexical items that may, on another occasion, be so analyzed). The context for this concern is a paper that I recently submitted to a leading journal, which—the paper, that is—was tossed back at me after being savagely rejected by one of the reviewers. One of the many things the reviewer objected to was a section in which, in passing, I entertained the proposal that utterance final Q-morphemes in East Asian languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin might be extra-grammatical in the sense defined above; in the particular case at hand,  which concerns the analysis of interrogative không, I was in fact rejecting such a proposal for không. But no matter: the mere suggestion of extra-grammaticality was enough to horrify, indeed flabbergast, the reviewer of the afore-unnamed journạl. Verbatim, if not literally (whatever the literal meaning of flabbergast might be, I think he was exaggerating). Quoth he: (“[The] statement ...that “many languages have lexical elements that are extra-metrical in this sense—present in utterances but not in sentences..."... left me flabbergasted.”

For this, and doubtless other, sounder, reasons, the reviewer was minded to urge rejection of the paper, and the editor duly complied.