Vietnamese Linguistics, Typology and Language Universals

A state-of-the-fields workshop organized by Trang Phan (HYI Visiting Scholar, 2020-21), in collaboration with John Phan (Assistant Professor, Columbia University), sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute

Day 1: 16 April 2021

8am -8.15 Opening speech

Panel 1: Historical Linguistics

• 8.15-9.00 Masaaki Shimizu (Osaka University) Philological Study of Vietnamese History -Nôm Materials for 19th-Century Southern Dialect
• 9.00-9.45 Mark Alves (Montgomery College) Lexical Evidence of the Vietic Household Before and After Language Contact with Sinitic
• 9.45-10.30 John Phan (Columbia University) & Hilario DeSousa (EHESS-CRLAO) Southwestern Middle Chinese: Evidence from Xiang, Pinghua, and Sino-Vietnamese

Panel 2: Phonetics & Phonology

• 10.45-11.30 Marc Brunelle (University of Ottawa) & Phạm Thị Thu Hà (Hồ Chí Minh City University of Education) Individual and task-conditioned variation in the intonation of southern Vietnamese
• 11.30-12.15 James Kirby (University of Edinburgh) & Mark Alves (Montgomery College) Exploring Statistical Regularities in the Syllable Canon of Sino-Vietnamese Loanword Phonology

Day 2: 17 April 2021

Panel 3: Morphology & Syntax

• 8am -8.45 Nigel Duffield (Konan University) UG in the Eye of the Beholder: a Naturalist’s Take on Syntactic Variation
• 8.45-9.30 Trần Phan & Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai (National Tsing Hua University Taiwan) Non-canonical what-questions in Vietnamese
• 9.30-10.15 Michal Starke (Masaryk University) & Trang Phan (Vietnam National University Hanoi) Yes-No questions and the Vietnamese clause structure

Panel 4: Semantics & Pragmatics

• 10.30-11.15 Yi-Ling Irene Liao, Trần Phan & Tzong‐Hong Jonah Lin (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) An antisymmetry approach to post-nominal modification in Vietnamese
• 11.15-12.00 Trang Phan (Vietnam National University Hanoi) & Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University) Putting three pieces of a puzzle into place: classifiers – plurals – articles in Vietnamese
• 12.00-12.45 Tue Trinh (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) Remarks on the Vietnamese pronominal system