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Article published In: Language and Linguistics
Vol. 19:1 (2018) ► pp.196–208

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Ellipsis of terms of address and reference in casual communication events in Vietnamese

 | University of New England
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 5 January 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00007.ton
Abstract
There is a general view that pro-drop only occurs in languages with either a ‘rich’ inflectional system (Taraldsen, Tarald. 1978. On the NIC, vacuous application and the that-trace filter. Cambridge: MIT. (Manuscript.) (Reproduced in 1980 by the Indiana University Linguistics Club as On the nominative island condition, vacuous application, and the that-trace filter.)Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding (Studies in Generative Grammar 9). Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Jaeggli, Osvaldo. 1982. Topics in Roman syntax (Studies in Generative Grammar). Foris: Dordrecht.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Suñer, Margarita. 1982. Big PRO and little pro . (Paper read at the 1st Workshop on Spanish Syntax, Burnaby, June 1982.)), or in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or other nominal feature (. 1989. Pro-drop in Chinese: A generalized control theory. In Jaeggli, Osvaldo A. & Safir, Kenneth J. (eds.), The null subject parameter (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol. 15), 185–214. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Neeleman, Ad & Szendrői, Kriszta. 2005. Pro drop and pronoun. In Alderete, John & Han, Chung-hye & Kochetov, Alexei (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 299–307. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The Vietnamese language fits neither of these categories. The explanation of the phenomenon of ellipsis of terms of address and reference (toa) in this paper is, therefore, not based on these morphological grounds. Rather, it is presented from a pragmatic perspective, which employs discourse analysis as its major methodology. The paper attempts to demonstrate the fact that although Vietnamese is not a pro-drop language in its traditional definition, ellipsis of toa in casual communication events among Vietnamese speakers is very common, and highly situational. In other words, these elliptic items in this case are referred to as references “in a form of situational (exophoric) presupposition” (Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1976. Cohesion in English (Volume 9 of English language series). London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 145).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ellipsis of Vietnamese toa
  • 3.Theoretical concept: Content analysis and conversation analysis
  • 4.Data and analysis
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (41)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ton, Thoai N. L.
2019. A literature review of address studies from pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives. In It’s not all about you [Topics in Address Research, 1], ► pp. 23 ff. DOI logo

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