ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to argue that Vietnamese has a system of Lexical (Inner) Aspect, or Situation Aspect, which works independently from the system of Grammatical (Outer) Aspect, or Viewpoint Aspect. While the latter is connected to perfectivity, the former centers on telicity. The chapter aims to address the following questions. (i) How can we determine telicity in Vietnamese? (ii) How is telicity represented syntactically in Vietnamese? (iii) How does the proposed syntactic analysis of telicity, via an Inner Aspect projection within the VP shell, help to capture other descriptive facts about Vietnamese extended verb phrase including the thematic hierarchy in causative constructions?
