SEMANTICS OF THE CONSTRUCTION [ĐÃ + X] IN VIETNAMESE

Abstract

The word đã has been seen so far as past tense marker by many researchers in Vietnamese linguistics. The misleading description of đã can be explained by being semantically modelled on the tenses systems in inflectional languages. However, its usage by the native Vietnamese and our semantic analysis of its semantics carried out on the base of the data collected from Vietnamese literature and media have showed that the functions of đã are determined only by contexts in which it can appear, that is, đã and words that can follow it form together a construction like [đã + X] functioning not as a tense marker, but as an aspectual marker.