ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to address the question of whether Vietnamese is a tensed or tenseless language given its poor inflectional morphology. The chapter first investigates the non-peripherality, the non-optionality, and the hierarchy of a number of morphemes that express temporal/aspectual relations in Vietnamese, and posit that they are genuine tense and aspect markers, which are distinguished from temporal/aspectual adverbs. It then discusses other properties which are associated with tensedness including bare predicates, finiteness and expletive subjects. Bringing these pieces of evidence together, it is concluded that syntactically Vietnamese is a tensed language.
