VOG Update: Mood and Modality

Just completed first draft of the English introduction to the section on mood and modality. More work is necessary-and of course-the Vietnamese data are still missing, but it's a start

Introduction to Mood and Modality

Update on Relatives (Accessibility Hierarchy)

I've added some preliminary data (courtesy of Trang Phan) on the Accessibility Hierarchy to the section on postnominal structure

Update on Topicalization and Topic Prominence

Some changes have been made to the following sections on topicalization

New section added

As of today, I've added one new section on predicate adjectives, and revised another, on relative clauses. All comments welcome.

Update 16/04/09 Ellipsis, Gapping, etc

Before the Easter break, I was working on another pet topic: ellipsis and anaphora. With Trang's help, I've managed to make some progress in understanding these phenomena, or at least in realizing some of the differences. The interim conclusions are now! that Vietnamese doesn't allow VPE, Gapping, or ACD (though there are some interesting exceptions to this), and that the structures corresponding to Sluicing in Vietnamese tend to support an alternative analysis of the English cases also (perhaps along the lines of Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). The discussion is spread across two pages (I'm trying to restrict each section to ca 150 lines of html code):

http://www.vietnamese-grammar.group.shef.ac.uk/grammar_en.php?ID=82&LANG=_en
http://www.vietnamese-grammar.group.shef.ac.uk/grammar_en.php?ID=83&LANG=_en

As always, comments are most welcome.

Update 25/03/09

Some curious facts about ellipsis. I've just written up parts of the ellipsis section: with a brief discussion of VP-ellipsis, Gapping, Sluicing, ACDs etc. It seems that Vietnamese permits the first two, an interesting variant on the third, but disallows the fourth. If these facts are true, they tell us something valuable about standard analyses of sluicing (they're wrong!) and my initial assumptions about ellipsis in Vietnamese (Duffield 2007), which is probably incorrect as well...

http://www.vietnamese-grammar.group.shef.ac.uk/grammar_en.php?ID=82&LANG=_en

Update 19/03/09

New section begun on ellipsis phenomena, more to follow soon.

http://www.vietnamese-grammar.group.shef.ac.uk/grammar_en.php?ID=82&LANG=_en

Update 17/3/09 Causativization

Today I've started a particularly challenging section on transitivity/GF-changing by dealing with an easy extra: synthetic causatives. Hopefully, the more interesting content will come in the next few days...

To view the new section, click here: http://www.vietnamese-grammar.group.shef.ac.uk/grammar_en.php?ID=81&LANG=_en

Updates

In order to let you know what's going on and also draw some more attention to this site, I've decided to start posting news of recent changes to the Online Grammar. So here goes...

In the last week I've created and/or substantially revised content relating to:

Prenominal modification, including discussion of numerals and (in)definiteness marking, the special status of the classifier cái;

Conjunctions and Complementizers in Vietnamese, including discussion of là as complementizer and copular verb

Existential Constructions, comparisons with Celtic

plus several more or less descriptive sections on:

Suffixation

Degree Adverbials

Reciprocals

As ever, if you see anything of interest, please let me know.