Null Anaphora in Vietnamese

This chapter describes the distribution, interpretation, and licensing factors of null anaphora in Vietnamese, and argues that null subjects and objects in Vietnamese may arise as the result of different mechanisms, either being lexically available as ‘null pronouns’ or arising as the result of a process of syntactic ellipsis applying directly to objects (argument ellipsis) or larger constituents such as verb phrases (VP ellipsis). The chapter also considers the occurrence of null adjunct interpretations, and suggests that such these are not produced by any syntactic process but arise as the result of the pragmatic enrichment of a discourse, in ways akin to the use of scene-setting adverbials.