Vietnamese expletive between grammatical subject and subjectivity marker

Abstract

In this paper, we undertake a systematic investigation of the peculiar behavior of the optional expletive subject pronoun nó expl in spoken Vietnamese. The first part of our study consists of an in-depth examination of its syntactic and semantic properties in comparison to those of its referential counterpart. From this overview, it appears that the distribution of nó expl is jointly determined by syntactic and discourse factors. We then critically appraise the recent analysis by Greco et al. (2018a, b), according to which nó expl imposes a specificity requirement on sentences containing it. We suggest to reinterpret this requirement as a corollary of the assessment by the speaker of a given state of affairs against her epistemic background. Pursuing the line of argumentation developed in Dao (2014) and integrating insights from Speas-Tenny’s syntactic approach to Evidentiality (Speas & Tenny 2003; Speas 2004; Tenny 2006), we argue that nó expl is best treated as an ego-evidential marker. We further show that nó expl does not intrinsically encode evidentiality but acquires its evidential import via syntactic processes.

3 | 1 | 2023

“…Other left-peripheryrelated effects have been also detected as the contribution of 'expletive' subject-like pronouns in various languages. For instance, the Vietnamese expletive nó has been analyzed by Greco et al (2018a;2018b) as contributing speaker-related epistemic specificity, whereas the same marker is analyzed in Dao (2021) as an ego-evidential marker (roughly, indicating the speaker's assessment of a particular situation based on their knowledge and beliefs). Expletive-like pronouns have been observed also to act as cleft-like items linking a predication to a previous discourse (Camacho 2019 for Central Colombian Spanish), exclamative force markers (Remberger, Hinzelin 2009 for Portuguese, Balearic Catalan), complementizers of main clauses (de Clercq, Haegeman 2018; 2021 for the Ghent dialect; van Craenenbroeck 2022 for Belgian Dutch dialects), etc.…”