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VIETNAMESE LONDON ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN LANGUAGE LIBRARY Editors Theodora Bynon David C. Bennett School of Oriental and African Studies London Masayoshi Shibatani Kobe University Advisory Board James Bynon, Bernard Comrie, Judith Jacob, Gilbert Lazard, Christian Lehmann, James A. Matisoff, Vladimir P. Nedjalkov, Robert H. Robins, Christopher Shackle The LONDON ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN LANGUAGE LIBRARY aims to make available a series of reliable and up-to-date descriptions of the grammatical structure of a wide range of Oriental and African languages, in a form readily accessible to the non- specialist. With this in mind, the language material in each volume will be in roman script, fully glossed and translated. The Library is based at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, Europe's largest institution specializing in the study of languages and cultures of Africa and Asia. Each volume is written by an acknowledged expert in the field who has carried out original research on the language and has first-hand knowledge of the area in which it is spoken. Volume 9 Nguyen Dình-Hoà Vietnamese VIETNAMESE TIENG VIET KHÔNG SON PHAN NGUYEN DÌNH-HOA Southern Illinois University, Carbondale JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nguyen Dình-Hoa, 1924- Vietnamese = Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan / Nguyen Dinh-Hoa. p. cm. -- (London Oriental and African language library, ISSN 1382-3485 ; v. 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Vietnamese language-Grammar. I. Title. II. Series. PL4374.N427 1997 495.9'228421-dc21 97-4965 ISBN 90 272 3809 X (Eur.) / 1-55619-733-0 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © Copyright 1997 - John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA CONTENTS Preface ix Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Vietnamese as a national language 1 1.2 Affinity with Chinese 2 1.3 Genetic relationship 2 1.4 Class-related dialects? 4 1.5 Language and religion 5 1.6 History of the language 5 1.7 Writing systems 6 1.8 Diversity 9 1.9 Kinesics 11 1.10 Syllabic Structure 11 1.11 Morphemes, words and larger sequences 15 Chapter 2. The sound system 17 2.0 An isolating language 17 2.1 Syllabic structure 18 2.2 Number of possible syllables 28 2.3 Below the syllable 28 2.4 Syllable boundaries 30 2.5 Stress and intonation 31 2.6 Earlier records and recent reforms 33 Chapter 3. The lexicon 35 3.0 The word in Vietnamese 35 3.1 Monosyllables and polysyllables 35 3.2 Full words vs. empty words 36 3.3 Sino-Vietnamese (Hán-Viêt) 36 3.4 Morphemes 38 3.5 The simple word 40 3.6 Morphological processes 41 3.7 Reduplications 44 Chapter 4. The lexicon (continued) 59 4.0 Affixation and compounding 59 4.1 Prefixes 60 4.2 Suffixes 63 vi CONTENTS 4.3 Compounding 66 4.4 More on Sino-Vietnamese 76 4.5 Other foreign borrowings 78 4.6 Nominalization 79 4.7 Unanalyzed forms 81 4.8 Concluding remarks about the unit called tieng 81 Chapter 5. Parts of speech 83 5.0 Parts of speech 83 5.1 Nouns 88 5.2 Locatives 98 5.3 Numerals 101 Chapter 6. Parts of speech (continued) 107 6.0 Predicatives 107 6.1 (Functive) Verbs 108 6.2 Stative verbs 119 6.3 Substitutes 123 Chapter 7. Parts of speech (continued) 139 7.0 Function words 139 7.1 Adverbs 140 7.2 Connectives 162 7.3 Particles 165 7.4 Interjections 168 7.5 Multiple class membership 168 Chapter 8. The noun phrase 171 8.0 Phrase structure 171 8.1 The noun phrase 172 Chapter 9. The verb phrase 185 9.0 The verb phrase 185 9.1 Preverbs 186 9.2 The relative positions 188 9.3 Postverbs 189 9.4 The complement before and after the head verb 197 9.5 The di.... ve construction 198 9.6 The positions of postverb determiners 199 9.7 The adjectival phrase 200 9.8 Coordination CONTENTS VII Chapter 10. The sentence 209 10.0 The sentence as unit of communication 209 10.1 The simple sentence 209 10.2 The subject-less sentence 210 10.3 The sentence without a predicate 212 10.4 The subject-less sentence with a reduced predicate 213 10.5 The kernel <S-P> sentence 213 10.6 Adjuncts to the kernel <S-P> sentence 224 10.7 Sentence expansion 230 Chapter 11. The sentence (continued) 233 11.1 Types of sentences 233 11.1.1 The affirmative sentence 233 11.1.2 The negative sentence 233 11.1.3 The interrogative sentence 237 11.1.4 The imperative sentence 242 11.1.5 The exclamatory sentence 243 11.2 The compound sentence 244 11.2.1 Concatenation of simple sentences 244 11.2.2 Correlative pronouns 245 11.2.3 Connectives of coordination 245 11.3 The complex sentence 251 11.3.1 The embedded completive sentence 251 11.3.2 The embedded determinative sentence 253 Appendix 1. Parts of speech 256 Appendix 2. Texts 257 1. Folk verse about the lotus 257 2. Excerpt from a novel 258 3. Excerpt from a newspaper advertisement 261 Bibliography 263 Index 276 PREFACE This is not a complete grammar of Vietnamese, but only an essential, descriptive introduction to a Southeast Asian language that has over seventy million speakers. It is based on lecture notes I prepared for Vietnamese language and grammar classes taught in several institutions, including Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where I had to earn my rice by means of courses in general and applied linguistics as my main teaching load between 1969 and 1990. The book gives a conservative treatment to phonology, lexicon, and syntax, with relevant comments on semantics and a few historical remarks, particularly in connection with the writing systems, the loanwords and the syntactic structures. Being a native speaker of it, I have made sure I trust less my intuition than the early analyses undertaken by pioneer linguists from France, Great Britain, the USA, and Vietnam itself. I am particularly indebted to Le Van Ly, Murray B. Emeneau, Andre Haudricourt, Patrick Honey, R. B. Jones & Huynh Sanh Thong, and Laurence C. Thompson, etc. for their works, that appeared in the 1950s, as well as to the next wave of grammarians of Vietnamese (Bui Dúc Tinh, Truong Van Chinh, Nguyen Hien Le, Nguyen Qui-Hung, Duong Thanh Binh, Dào Thi Hoi, Nguyen Dang Liem, Buu Khai, Pham Van Hai, Tran Trong Hai, Marybeth Clark, etc.), whose publications came out in the 1960s and 1970s. While having the advantage of consulting nearly all the excellent monographs and journal articles produced by French authors of the last century as well as by Vietnamese academics around the Institute of Linguistics (established in Hanoi in 1969) , I was handicapped in not being able to use the voluminous research work by Russian linguists—my foreign language baggage being limited to French, English and Chinese, with only a smattering of Latin, Spanish and Thai. Luckily, the relevant courses (in x PREFACE general linguistics, English grammar, ESL methodology, Vietnamese grammar, language planning, and lexicography) at SIU-Carbondale, provided me with opportunities to do several contrastive analyses and to learn first hand from many native speakers of non-European languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and such Southeast Asian systems as Thai, Khmer and Malay-Indonesian. I am thus very grateful for such an enriching exposure to a large variety of typological and areal features. Next I would be remiss if I failed to mention the highly significant contributions of my esteemed colleagues of the Saigon Branch of S.I.L. (Summer Institute of Linguistics), including those who did field work on the minority languages in South Vietnam between 1957 and 1975: I certainly benefited from various insights offered by Richard Pittman, David Thomas, Kenneth Gregerson, Jean Donaldson, Richard Watson, Ralph Haupers, to name only a few, regarding the salient features of Vietnamese in contrast with other languages of the region. I am also indebted to the French Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library, and Japan's Toyo Bunko Library, to several stateside libraries that have respectable Southeast Asia holdings, and to the Fu Tsu-Nien Library of Academia Sinica in Nankang, Taipei, for many valuable materials. Finally my thanks go to Professors Theodora Bynon, Matt Shibatani and David Bennett of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where I spent my first sabbatical leave in 1975, and to the editors of John Benjamins Publishing Company in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for their extremely helpful assistance in editorial matters. I fervently hope that this monograph—meant to be titled "Vietnamese Without Veneer" following my former supervisor Andre Martinet's Le Francais sans fard—will help both teachers and students of Vietnamese in different institutions of higher learning as well as in secondary and primary schools around the world. This compact sketch of the workings and functions of a truly wonderful tongue is dedicated first of all to my parents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, cousins, children and grandchildren, and beyond the Nguyen clan, to all my former teachers of language and literature (in Vietnam and abroad), and last but not least to all my former students. Nguyen Dình-Hoa