Unpeeling an onion: what Vietnamese tells us about the lexicon-syntax interface

Last week, I had the great fortune to attend the International Conference on Linguistics Training and Research in Vietnam, held at USSH, VNU, Hanoi. My first visit to Vietnam, I hope the first of many. During my stay, I was able to give two presentations. I'm posting the slides from the first colloquium talk, which will be written up more fully shortly (and essentially a synopsis of Chapter 1 of the elusive, but not quite mythical, monograph). In the meantime, there should be enough on the slides to make for useful reading. If you have comments or questions—about Vietnamese syntax, though not about onions—please get in touch.

Click to view presentation

(I've replaced the html version with a pdf file, which should be easier to read)

Problems with 13 Little Boats

For a number of reasons, I have had cause to go back to—and reformat—a paper on Irish numeral phrases that I presented long ago (in 1995) at a Canadian Linguistics Association Meeting. The paper was to have appeared in the Proceedings, but I have not been able to find any existent copies or links to such. If anyone knows of a link where this publication can be found, I'll take this down; otherwise, it's available here.

Click to access pdf file

Arcane as the topic may seem, the syntax of numeral phrases is, I think, a revealing phenomenon, showing the possible limits of conventional phrase-structure syntax to handle discontinuous dependencies and spreading agreement. It also offers a good treatment of classifier phrases in East Asian languages (developing ideas originally due to Elisabeth Löbel 1990). It was written at a time when I still believed that a purely syntactic solution was the best solution to every problem: I'm less sure now, but it's not a bad technical attempt.

Skin Deep…or Fatal: Wishful Thinking and the Logical Implications of Cultural Relativity

Some more thoughts about cultural relativity and perception.

Click here to download pdf file

Over the last couple of years—and in more concentrated fashion in recent months—I have been giving attention to the serious1 psychological literature on cultural relativity/relativism (CR), and especially to reports of significant differences between Western Caucasians and East Asians, with respect to visual perception, discrimination and categorization, and to moral and aesthetic judgments. The familial relevance of such issues should be obvious: if cultural relativism is more than skin deep, then it is important for me to have a greater appreciation of how Japanese people see the world and organize experience if I want to understand those close to me, and help my bicultural children reconcile what are allegedly quite distinct world-views (not that this appears to be a great stretch for them).

Grammatica una et eadem est...: reflections on language universals and linguistic diversity

This the prefinal draft of a public lecture I'm due to give next week at Kobe College. It continues the discussion in Sapir-Whorf Redux, rehearsing some of the arguments presented there, taking up some other issues, in what is, I hope, a more accessible form (given that the lecture is directed at non-linguists, it had better be).

Click here to download pdf file

Comments welcome, as ever.

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…