The Characteristic of Vietnamese Unaccusative Verbs in the Motion-Caused Constructions

Abstract

This paper investigates the characteristics of non-agentive predicates in Vietnamese, focusing on their syntactic and functional roles within causative constructions that denote motion. Differing from the Subject-Predicate analysis of unaccusative predicates in Western languages, the Topic-Comment framework in Vietnamese allows for flexible positioning of the patient, which can either precede or follow the unaccusative predicate in its internal structure. The two surface structures of the unaccusative predicate in causative motion constructions share the function of marking a resultative state. Their distinction, however, is a matter of topical focus: one emphasizes the event's outcome, while the other highlights the patient and its final state after undergoing the caused action. To examine the prosodic segmentation between causative and non-agentive predicates, often treated as a fixed syntactic unit, the study analyzed the spoken data of 21 native Vietnamese speakers (07 male, 14 female), aged 24-50, representing Southern, Central, and Northern dialects with varied sentence structures involving causative-resultative constructions. Acoustic Acoustic analysis using Praat software, focusing on pitch, intensity, duration, and intonational breaks, reveals a prosodic boundary between adjacent causative and unaccusative predicates. This finding suggests that the construction is unlikely to be a fixed structure or a single syntactic unit. Aligning with the topic-prominent nature of Vietnamese, the results demonstrate that the placement of the unaccusative predicate is determined by information focus within the Comment clause: the predicate precedes the patient to highlight the event's outcome, whereas it follows the patient to highlight the affected entity.