Le Quang Anh. Time-marking words in Vietnamese: from fallacious tense-aspect-mood markers to modal particles of sequentiality

University of Adelaide, 2022. — 235 p.This thesis investigates the issues in the categorisation of a small group of six functional words (đã, sẽ, sắp, mới, rồi, chưa) in Vietnamese, which I call time-marking particles for simplicity. I clearly distinguish these particles from the existing Vietnamese tense-aspect-mood markers (đang, được, có, từng, định, phải). By identifying these time-marking particles, I elaborate on two major issues in the categorisation of the particles in the literature: the fact that time-marking particles have been consistently grouped with TAM markers, and the fact that the very theoretical foundation of TAM theories is not suitable for the analysis of these particles. I then argue that the particles are essentially discourse particles (DP) in recognition of strikingly similar behaviour of these particles and discourse particles, especially the fact that the particles are often omitted (i.e. covertly marked) in speech. To prove this similarity from an empirical perspective, I analyse the covert-overt nature of two of the particles (đã and sẽ) by asking 101 participants to re-narrate an original story priming for the natural and spontaneous elicitation of the two particles. The quantitative evidence from this study confirms that regional variation does not interfere with these covert-overt occurrences of the particles, whereas the qualitative evidence confirms the significant discourse function of the particles being markers of sequential transitions between different events. From these findings, I devise a new grammatical framework to reanalyse these particles as a subclass of discourse particles that signals the sequential transition between trans-sentential units.