| This thesis presents a study of the internal structure of Vietnamese noun phrases in the framework of DP from a principles and parameters' perspective. As one of the most fundamental syntactic structures, noun phrases have been deeply researched by the linguists. However, their study mainly focussed on Indo-European languages, which let Vietnamese, an important member of the Mon-Khmer family being neglected for a long time. Therefore our analysis not only provides a supplementary argument for previous theoretics, but also lays a foundation for a panoramic research of Vietnamese in the future.The dominant theory addressed in this paper is the DP hypothesis with some recently developed ideas in this field. It can be seen from chapter 2 that linguists have done successful work in analyzing structure of NPs in different languages guided by the rules and routes of the DP hypothesis. Albeit the insufficiencies their approaches of derivation exact significant effect on the study of Vietnamese in this paper,Chapter 3 provides a detailed description of the nominal word order patterns in Vietnamese. Here special importance is attached to the characteristics of some unique combinations such as classifier-noun, noun-adjective, etc. Finally a word order template of Vietnamese noun phrases with all the internal elements comes forth. Chapter 4 is devoted to the structural analysis based on the previous discoveries and the data presented in chapter 3. A structural expression is given to each of the main functional categories and a full-fledged noun phrase. Our results show that although Vietnamese noun phrases bear some integration features of two different language families, their underlying structure is identical with all the other languages.Furthermore, a comparison between Vietnamese and Chinese at the nominal phrasal level is also carried out in this thesis, which may be helpful for us to clarify the relationship between these two languages and to have a further understanding of human languages. |
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