Just completed these three paragraphs in the revised Preface. I hope they improve things. Comments welcome.
With respect to the former goal, I hope to demonstrate that
a generative, universalist approach to Vietnamese grammar can be genuinely
elucidating: that the concepts and constructs of Universal Grammar[1],
which have been postulated as part of a top-down, hypothetico-deductive
strategy, and largely on the basis of (sometimes abstruse) data from a limited
range of Western languages—that such concepts can be applied productively to
the analysis of Vietnamese as well. What’s more, I will argue that Vietnamese
can be shown to express these properties more directly, and more clearly, than
is the case in more synthetic or fusional languages. Developing the
‘transparent onion’ analogy in the prefatory quote above, I shall claim that what is most remarkable
about Vietnamese are the formal properties it shares with other unrelated
language varieties, including English and French. What makes Vietnamese special
is not, I will suggest, the properties
that distinguish it from other language, but rather its unique capacity to
express commonalities with such phenomenal clarity.
A reason for stressing this point is to acknowledge that
many—perhaps most—scholars of Vietnamese are highly sceptical of ahistorical
formal approaches to grammatical analysis, especially those based on English
and French. Often, this scepticism is justified by reference to previous treatments
in which Vietnamese has been analyzed directly in terms of Western surface
categories or constructions; for example, an analysis that identifies the TAM
markers (sẽ, đã and đang) as Tense morphemes, or one that equates null subject in
Vietnamese with those in Italian or Spanish. One can always fit a square peg
through a round hole if the diameter of the circle is large enough, but that
doesn’t make it a good fit. In other cases, certain real or hypothetical
attempts to impose Western-derived analytical constructs can appear preposterous:
to seek to explain the behaviour of the modal-aspectual particle đựơc
in terms of a construction-based analysis of the English or French Passive, for
example, almost entirely misses the point. One can dress an octopus in a t-shirt
for the sake of propriety, but little is gained by it and the problem of the
other six legs remains.
Whichever metaphor is more useful, it is a fact that many
linguistic scholars have rejected generative theory in the past, and that
historical or functional explanations are to the fore in contemporary grammatical
research. But this is to ‘throw the baby [square peg, octopus] out with the
bath-water.’ In this work, I hope to make the case that—at the right level of
abstraction—Vietnamese fits not just well, but nearly perfectly, into a universal template: it is the other object languages of grammatical
theorising that require prodding and shuffling about. When viewed from this
opposite perspective, the Generative Enterprise (as it once was called) becomes
not only more attractive, but empowering: if Vietnamese offers a model of
perfection, then one can ask a different set of questions: why don’t other
languages seem to work so well? This brings us to my second goal, viz., to
understand what Vietnamese tells us about the details of UG.
