• 2025. Trinh, Tue. On well-formedness and meaningfulness. Submitted. [Abstract: This note explores Identity, the thesis that well-formedness co-incides with meaningfulness in natural language. Threats to Identity are posed by claims from both linguists and philosophers which include the following: (A) grammar can deceive us into thinking of a meaningless expression that it is meaningful; (B) only sentences are meaningful; (C) trivialities are ill-formed. I critically examine each of these claims and suggest responses to them which support Identity. I also discuss how Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Language provides a way to reconcile Identity with empirical data that motivate (C).]
• 2025. Bar-Lev, Moshe, Itai Bassi & Tue Trinh. Symmetry breaking, Partition by Exhaustification, and Fatal Competition. Submitted, under revision. [Abstract: A prominent solution to the ‘symmetry problem’ allows implicatures to be computed from simple but not from complex alternatives (‘Complexity’; Katzir 2007). Recently Schwarz and Wagner (2024) have proposed a different mechanism for symmetry breaking (‘Blocking’), arguing that it can, but Complexity cannot, account for cases of so-called ‘simplex threats’ in which the simple alternative is available but the expected implicature is unattested. This note provides a defense of Complexity. We show that it explains simplex threats once coupled with constraints on questions (‘Partition by Exhaustification’; Fox 2019, 2020) and on assertability of sentences with contextually equivalent alternatives (‘Fatal Competition’; Magri 2009, Bar-Lev and Fox 2023). We furthermore point out (following Schmitt and Haslinger 2025) that Blocking makes the wrong prediction for some cases.]
• 2025. Bassi, Itai & Tue Trinh. Conditional questions as matrix questions with syntactic reconstruction. Submitted, under revision. [Abstract: Conditional Questions (CQs), structures such as “If it’s raining, will Joanna leave?”, pose a puzzle: they look like conditionals, but are interpreted like questions. Existing accounts in the literature all take the surface form of CQs at face value and treat them as matrix conditionals scoping over a question, and thus must employ sophisticated semantic machinery to produce a question meaning out of them (Isaacs and Rawlins 2008; Ciardelli et al. 2019). We develop and argue for an alternative theory on which CQs are, despite surface appearance, underlyingly matrix questions scoping over a conditional. The input to semantic interpretation is obtained as a result of syntactic reconstruction of the if-clause under the question— an independently needed mechanism. The theory does not necessitate any sophisticated semantics to handle CQs, and we show that it makes correct predictions with respect to diagnostics for reconstruction that surface-syntax accounts don’t make. We also argue that the extra semantic machinery employed by previous accounts is harmful in being at risk of over-generating unattested structures, a problem avoided by our account which only makes use of conservative semantics for CQs.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. Saying the unsayable, in Vietnamese. To appear in Translating and Interpreting the Tractatus, edited by Michael Beaney & David G. Stern. Palgrave Macmillan. [Abstract: This note discusses translation in and of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein took translation to be word-for-word. This view conflicts with reality. I propose to resolve the conflict by separating logical forms, which represent thoughts, from their externalization, which makes these thoughts perceptible to the senses. I also relate some problems I encountered when translating the Tractatus from German to Vietnamese.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. An argument for a biclausal analysis of yes/no questions in Vietnamese. To appear in Proceedings of CLS 60. [Abstract: I consider two analyses of yes/no questions in Vietnamese. The ‘monoclausal analysis’ takes such questions to be of the form O(p), where O(p) = {p,¬p}, while the ‘biclausal analysis’ takes them to be of the form O(p)(q), where O(p)(q) = {p,q}. I argue in favor of the biclausal analysis on the basis of three observations: (i) subjects of yes/no questions cannot associate with only; (ii) subjects of yes/no questions cannot be quantifiers; and (iii) modal adverbs in yes/no questions can follow but not precede the polarity head. The argument relies crucially on the general requirement that answers to a question, once exhaustified, partition the context set.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. On Wittgenstein on translation. To appear in Proceedings of the 46th International Wittgenstein Symposium. [Abstract: Proposition 4.025 of the Tractatus describes translation as replacing each word in the original language text with its target language counterpart. This requires a one-one correspondence between vocabularies of the two languages, which never transpires in real life. I argue that Wittgenstein’s remark should be read as articulating the theory of language which he promoted in the Tractatus: it tells us what translation looks like when that theory applies under ideal conditions. I then propose an account for the difference between translation in real life and translation as described by Wittgenstein. The account draws on the fact that language has a communcative function in addition to its representative function.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. Cardinal determiners and the clausal analysis of exceptives. Linguistica Brunensia 73. [Abstract: This note presents a novel observation: exceptives do not tolerate cardinal determiners. It discusses three analyses of exceptives that do not account for this observation: (i) von Fintel (1993) which takes exceptives to be modifers of predicates; Moltmann (1995) which takes exceptives to be modifiers of quantifiers; and (iii) Vostrikova (2021) which takes exceptives to be modifiers of clauses. It then proposes a slight modification of Vostrikova’s analysis which retains the virtues of the original and in addition accounts for the fact that exceptives do not tolerate cardinal determiners.]
• 2025. Tue Trinh, Anton Benz, Daniel Goodhue, Kazuko Yatsushiro & Manfred Krifka (eds). Biased questions: Experimental Results & Theoretical Modelling. Language Science Press. [The contributions in this volume grew out of talks presented at the workshop Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling, which took place at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft as part of the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD). The papers explore biased questions from a variety of theoretical angles: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, phonology, psychology, and acquisition. The languages under discussion include Chinese, English, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. A note on bias and polarity in Vietnamese. In Biased questions: Experimental Results & Theoretical Modelling, edited by Tue Trinh, Anton Benz, Daniel Goodhue, Kazuko Yatsushiro & Manfred Krifka. pp. 241–260. Language Science Press. [Abstract: Vietnamese has two types of NPIs, simple and complex, and two types of polar questions, yes/no questions and agreement questions. Simple NPIs can occur in both types of polar questions while complex NPIs can occur in yes/no but not in agreement questions. I propose an account for this fact using familiar ingredients of semantic and syntactic analyses. I then discuss some ways in which Vietnamese and English differ with respect to how distinctions in meaning align with distinctions in form.]
• 2025. Krifka, Manfred & Tue Trinh. Introduction. In Biased questions: Experimental Results & Theoretical Modelling, edited by Tue Trinh, Anton Benz, Daniel Goodhue, Kazuko Yatsushiro & Manfred Krifka, pp. v–xxiv. Language Science Press.
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. Partition by Exhaustification and polar questions in Vietnamese. Languages 10(9), 233. [Abstract: This note presents a series of contrasts pertaining to Vietnamese polar questions: (i) the subject can be definite but not quantificational; (ii) the subject can be plain but not only-focused; (iii) the modal adverb chắc chắn ‘certainly’ can follow but not precede verum focus. I argue that a monoclausal analysis, advocated in several previous works, will have difficulties accounting for these contrasts, and propose a bi-clausal analysis which explains them in a natural way. The explanation relies on the assumption of a general condition on questions, Partition by Exhaustification (PbE), in conjunction with some other independently motivated semantic and pragmatic constraints.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue & Itai Bassi. Questions and connectives. In The Connectives in Logic and Language. TLLM 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 15410, edited by Jialiang Yan, Mingming Liu, Dag Westerståhl & Xiaolu Yang, pp. 93–105. Springer. [Abstract: We propose a conservative analysis for conditional questions, i.e. those of the form if φ, Q where φ expresses a proposition and Q a question. Our analysis retains the standard interpretation of if as a propositional operator and yields the right intuitions regarding the answers to these questions. Furthermore, we explain why and and or cannot embed questions the same way if does. We show how our account overcomes difficulties faced by previous theories, and discuss some open problems for future research.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. On similative reduplication in Vietnamese. Languages 10(7), 150. [Abstract: Vietnamese has a productive reduplication strategy where the reduplicant appears to the right of the base and is segmentally identical to the base except that its last rhyme is iếc. In this note I attempt to account for some observations about iếc including the fact that it gives rise to ignorance inferences and is incompatible with classifiers. I propose that the semantics of iếc parallels the pragmatics of disjunctions, and that the notion of similarity underlying the interpretation of iếc is contextual while that underlying the interpretation of classifiers is grammatical.]
• 2025. Trinh, Tue. Some differences between English and Vietnamese with respect to NPI licensing. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 23(3): 109–125. [Abstract: The cross-linguistic research on “negative polarity items” (NPIs) not only reveals what contraints are imposed by semantics on the output of syntax but also provides insights into how individual languages differ with respect to the way they satisfy these constraints. This note makes a small contribution to this enterprise: it discusses some differences in distribution between NPIs in English and their counterparts in Vietnamese. The discussion is preluded by a brief introduction to background concepts and assumptions. The Vietnamese data are presented as a challenge which motivates further thought and investigation. A sketch of an approach is provided at the end.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue. Forms of address, performative prefixes, and the syntax-pragmatics interface. Journal of Pragmatics 228:17–30. [Abstract: Forms of address must be prononimal in English but can be either pronominal or nominal in Vietnamese. I propose to analyze this fact as a parametric difference: the two languages choose different ways to implement one and the same general principle of grammar. The analysis crucially relies on the hypothesis that some aspects of meaning which have traditionally been considered pragmatic are represented in the syntax.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue. Logicality and the picture theory of language. Synthese 203:127. [Abstract: I argue that there is tension in Wittgenstein’s position on trivialities (i.e. tautologies and contradictions) in the Tractatus, as it contains the following claims: (A) sentences are pictures; (B) trivialties are not pictures; (C) trivialities are sentences. A and B follow from the “picture theory of language” which Wittgenstein proposes, while C contradicts it. I discuss a way to resolve this tension in light of Logicality, a hypothesis recently developed in linguistic research. Logicality states that trivialities are excluded by the grammar, and that under the right analysis sentences which look trivial are in fact contingent. The tools necessary to support Logicality, I submit, were not available to Wittgenstein at the time, which explains his commitment to C. I end the paper by commenting on some points of contact between analytic philosophy and the generative enterprise in linguistics which are brought into relief by the discussion.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue. Strengthened, and weakened, by belief. Linguistics and Philosophy 47:37–76. [Abstract: This paper discusses a set of observations, many of which are novel, concerning differences between the adjectival modals certain and possible and their adverbial counterparts certainly and possibly. It argues that the observations can be derived from a standard interpretation of certain/certainly as universal and possible/possibly as existential quantifiers over possible worlds, in conjunction with the hypothesis that the adjectives quantifiy over knowledge and the adverbs quantify over belief. The claims on which the argument relies include the following: (i) knowledge implies belief, (ii) agents have epistemic access to their belief, (iii) relevance is closed under speakers’ belief, and (iv) commitment is pragmatically inconsistent with explicit denial of belief.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue. Exceptives and cardinality. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 28: 912–923. [Abstract: There are two schools of thoughts on exceptives. The “Fintelians” take exceptives to be modifiers of the NP argument of the determiner, while the “Anti-Fintelians” take them to be something else. I present the observation that exceptives do not tolerate cardinal determiners. I then discuss the problem it poses for two Anti-Fintelian analyses and propose a Fintelian account. The main idea of the account is that exceptives introduce subdomain alternatives.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue. A note on speech act recursion. In Language Use and Linguistic Structure – Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2023, edited by Markéta Janebová, Michaela Čakányová, and Joseph Emonds, pp. 165–175. [Abstract: I present novel observations about iterated questions, i.e. questions about questions, and propose an analysis. The conclusions I argue for are the following: (i) speech acts are represented in the grammar; (ii) speech act recursion is possible but is limited to at most two levels; (ii) declarative questions are questions about an assertion act. I also show that assuming speech acts in the grammar can help systematize some puzzling differences between matrix and embedded sentences with respect to their pronunciation.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue. On Gisbert Fanselow’s (2002) argument against remnant VP movement. Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 96: Gisbert Fanselow’s Contributions to Syntactic Theory, edited by Artemis Alexiadou, Doreen Georgi, Fabian Heck, Gereon Müller & Florian Schäfer, pp. 145–158. [Abstract: The theory of chain linearization I propose in a number of works predicts a typology in which German would exemplify a type if some cases of incomplete category fronting in this language do not involve VP remnant movement. This is precisely what Gisbert Fanselow argues for in one of his papers. In this note, I present this argument in its dialectical background and respond to some issues which arise from it.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue, Nghieu Vu & Trang Phan. Negation and polar question in Vietnamese: Present and past. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 22:67–88. [Abstract: Polar questions in Vietnamese consist of an affirmative sentence followed by a negation particle. Modern Vietnamese has three negation particles, but only two can occur in this function. This note proposes an account for this gap. The account is premised on the analysis of questions as sets of alternatives, and draws on facts of diachronic change gleaned from historical texts.]
• 2024. Trinh, Tue. Chức năng thông báo của ngôn ngữ và bản chất tả thực của tác phẩm hư cấu. Tham luận hội thảo Văn học So sánh Đông Nam Á: Lịch sử, Lý thuyết và những Khả năng Ứng dụng, 14/12/2023, Viện Hàn lâm Khoa học Xã hội, Hà Nội, Vietnam. [Tóm tắt: Sự tồn tại của văn học hư cấu là một thách thức đối với quan niệm kinh điển về ngôn ngữ như một công cụ trao đổi thông tin. Về mặt khái niệm, cung cấp thông tin có nghĩa là mô tả thế giới thực. Một tác phẩm hư cấu được sáng tác và tiếp nhận trong ý thức hỗ tương giữa người nói, tức tác giả, và người nghe, tức độc giả, rằng nó không mô tả thế giới thực. Mặc dù vậy, ngôn ngữ trong tác phẩm hư cấu không vận hành như thể chức năng thông báo của nó đã được vô hiệu hoá. Bài này đưa ra một cách nhìn về tác phẩm hư cấu trong đó mâu thuẫn nói trên được giải toả. Theo cách nhìn này, tác phẩm hư cấu, về bản chất, vẫn mang tính tả thực. Nó không vẽ ra một thế giới không thực, mà nói cho chúng ta biết thế giới thực sẽ ra sao dưới một sự thay đổi tối thiểu. Bài viết cũng đưa ra một lập luận ngôn ngữ học để cho thấy cách ta tiếp nhận tác phẩm hư cấu có điểm chung với cách ta hiểu câu điều kiện, tức câu có hình thức nếu p thì q.]
• 2023. Trinh, Tue. Epistemic bias anti-licenses NPIs in polar questions. Proceedings of SALT 33: 563–582. [Abstract: There is general agreement that the distribution of any is unrestricted in polar questions. I argue that this is not the case: in contexts where there is epistemic bias in favor of the prejacent of a polar question, the question exhibits the same behavior as a declarative with respect to the licensing of any. I provide an account for this observation in terms of intervention: epistemic bias forces polar questions to be parsed as having a silent modal  E which intervenes between any and the question operator whether that otherwise licenses any.]
• 2023. Trinh, Tue & Itai Bassi. Excursive questions. Open Linguistics 9(1): 1–13. [Abstract: We present novel observations about a type of questions which occur quite frequently in natural discourse but which have so far remained unanalyzed. These are questions which inquire about a question act. We then propose an account which derives the observations. Our account relies crucially on the assumption that speech acts are grammatically represented.]
• 2023. Trinh, Tue. Comparing the derivation of modal domains and strengthened meanings. In Dynamics in Logic and Language. TLLM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13524, edited by Dun Deng, Mingming Liu, Dag Westerståhl & Kaibo Xie, pp. 156–166. Springer. [Abstract: The derivation of strengthened meanings as proposed by Bar-Lev and Fox (2017, 2020) and the derivation of modal domains as proposed by Kratzer (1977, 1981, 1991) both involve an “inclusion” step of assigning true to as many propositions in a given set as possible. In the case of strengthened meanings, this set contains the scalar alternatives. In the case of modal domains, it contains the propositions in the ordering source. In this note, we explicate what is common and what is distinct between the two inclusion procedures. We then point out that the formal distinction makes no empirical difference for the cases of strengthened meaning so far considered in the literature. We conjecture that this fact holds generally for all cases of strengthened meaning.]
• 2023. Trinh, Tue. Of pictures and trivialities. In Beiträge der Österreichischen Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft, Band XXIX, edited by Alois Pichler, Esther Heinrich-Ramharter and Friedrich Stadler, pp. 572–580. [A proceedings paper on the connection between the theory of language Wittgenstein proposed in the Tractatus and the Logicality Thesis recently developed in empirical linguistics.]
• 2023. Trinh, Tue. Đại từ và giao diện luận lý–ngữ dụng học. Tạp chí Khoa học và Công nghệ Đại học Duy Tân 02(57): 105–114. [Tóm tắt: Bài này mô tả một đặc tính luận lý của đại từ có khả năng lý giải sự hiện diện phổ quát của phạm trù này trong các ngôn ngữ tự nhiên. Sau đó, nó phác thảo một phương pháp phân loại đại từ cho tiếng Việt. Tiếp theo là một thảo luận về quan hệ giữa tính khả chấp của câu và tính trùng ngôn cũng như mâu thuẫn của nó, trong đó hệ quả hình thức của nghĩa xã hội được đề cập đến như một hiện tượng quan yếu đối với nghiên cứu giao diện luận lý–ngữ dụng học. Phần cuối của bài phân tích sự khác nhau giữa tiếng Việt và tiếng Anh liên quan đến việc sử dụng tên riêng để chỉ người nói và người nghe.]
• 2022. Bassi, Itai, Aron Hirsch & Tue Trinh. Pre-DP only is a propositional operator at LF: a new argument from ellipsis. Proceedings of SALT 32: 814–830. [Abstract: The syntax and semantics of only is controversial, in particular in cases where only appears off the clausal spine, such as when only precedes an object DP. In one view, only composes with the DP to form a quantifier. In another view, pre-DP only is locally vacuous, and signals the presence in the LF of a covert propositional operator. Based on the scope possibilities of pre-DP only relative to modals and their interaction with ellipsis, we provide a new argument (following Benbaji 2022) for a theory according to which the meaning associated with only does always come from a propositional operator at LF, despite surface appearances.]
• 2022. Yatsushiro, Kazuko, Tue Trinh, Marzena Żygis, Stephanie Solt, Anton Benz & Manfred Krifka. Certainly but not certain: The expression of subjective and objective probability. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1): 1–48. [Abstract: This paper investigates the interpretation of the epistemic modal adjectives possible, certain and their adverbial counterparts possibly, certainly, taking the perspective that the former express objective modality, whereas the latter express subjective modality. In support of this view, we report on two experiments that assess speakers’ acceptance of possible, certain, possibly, certainly in different contexts. Our results extend those of Lassiter (2016) in demonstrating a difference in interpretation between the adjectival and adverbial modals, with possibly less acceptable than possible but conversely certainly more acceptable than certain in the same situations. Furthermore, the results of our experiments suggest a new insight, namely that these differences depend, to some extent, on the probability of the eventuality in question and polarity of the prejacent sentence.]
• 2022. Trinh, Tue. Wittgenstein trivia. In For Manfred from his Students, edited by Sophie Repp & Tue Trinh. Kölner Universitätspublikation.
• 2022. Repp, Sophie & Tue Trinh (eds). For Manfred from his Students. Kölner Universitätspublikation. [This book contains contributions from people who wrote their Master’s or PhD thesis under Manfred Krifka’s supervision. It is meant as a small parting gift to Manfred Krifka on the end of his tenure as Director of the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. The editors have collected contributions on linguistic and non-linguistics subjects in a variety of genres. This diversity mirrors that of Manfred Krifka’s interests and research topics. It also reflects the diversity of the people whom he has helped.]
• 2022. Trinh, Tue. Three ways of referring to discourse participants in Vietnamese. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 15(4): 221–230. [Abstract: This note discusses the fact that in Vietnamese, speakers and hearers can refer to themselves by pronouns, proper names, or relational nouns. This makes Vietnamese different from English and many other languages which require discourse participants to refer to themselves by pronouns only. We sketch an account for this difference which involves a syntactically represented speech act level, a parameterization of Rule I with respect to its candidate set, and a well-formedness principle concerning the structure of bound nominals.]
• 2021. Haida, Andreas & Tue Trinh. Splitting atoms in natural language. In Formal Approaches to Number in Slavic and Beyond, edited by Mojmír Dočekal & Marcin Wągiel, pp. 277–296. Language Science Press. [Abstract: The cardinality analysis of numerical statements runs into problems with sentences containing non-integers such as “John read 2.5 novels.” We propose a semantics for numeral phrases which derives several observations on these sentences, and identify a number of open questions for future research.]
• 2021. Trinh, Tue, Trang Phan & Hung Phan. Deriving four generalizations about three classifier languages. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 66(4): 1–16. [Abstract: This note presents a set of facts concerning nominal structures in Bahnar, Mandarin, and Vietnamese. It proposes an account of these facts which reduces them to cross-linguistic differences with respect to the availability of particular syntactic configurations involving the bare nouns and its extended projection. These differences, in turn, are derived from cross-linguistic variations with respect to the availability of items in the functional lexicon.]
• 2020. Crnič, Luka & Tue Trinh. Ignorance, introspection, and epistemic modals. Proceedings of SALT 30: 645–653. [Abstract: Embedded epistemic modals are infelicitous under desire predicates when they are anchored to the belief state of the attitude holder. We present two ways of deriving this observation from an independently motivated property of desire predicates, their anti-opinionatedness.]
• 2020. Haida, Andreas & Tue Trinh. Zero and triviality. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 116. 1–14. [Abstract: This paper takes issue with Bylinina & Nouwen’s (2018) hypothesis that the numeral zero has the basic weak meaning of ‘zero or more.’ We argue, on the basis of empirical observation and theoretical consideration, that this hypothesis implies that exhaustification can circumvent L-triviality, but exhaustification cannot circumvent L-triviality. We also provide some experimental results to support our argument.]
• 2020. Trinh, Tue. Bipartite exhaustification: Evidence from Vietnamese. In Monotonicity in Logic and Language. TLLM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12564, edited by Dun Deng, Fenrong Liu, Mingming Liu, & Dag Westerståhl, pp. 207–216. Springer. [Abstract: This short note presents an empirical puzzle: the Vietnamese counterpart of any has two morphological variants, only one of which, namely the more complex one, is acceptable under an existential modal. The note then discusses a theory of any whose explanation of the acceptability of any under existential modals requires exhaustification. The Vietnamese fact is then shown to follow from the theory under the assumption that exhaustification has a bipartite syntax. The note ends with some open questions for further research.]
• 2020. Trinh, Tue, Giang Pham, Ben Pham, Hien Hoang & Linh Pham. The adaptation of MAIN to Vietnamese. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 64: 263–268. [Abstract: This paper describes the revision of the Vietnamese version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first introduce the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese-speaking populations after which we describe the translation and adaptation process of the Vietnamese MAIN and present results from monolingual and bilingual children.]
• 2019. Trinh, Tue. Exhaustification and contextual restriction. Frontiers in Communication 4(47): 1–7. [Abstract: This note gives a brief summary of the grammatical approach to implicatures, highlighting the perspective under which it presents an attempt at squaring empirical observations with basic principles of language use. It then raises a question about salience, a crucial but, as it turns out, quite elusive component of this approach, providing arguments that salience cannot be identified with relevance or utterance, and discussing some consequences of a stipulation on salience which shifts the empirical burden of the theory from having a clear definition of both salience and structural simplicity to having a clear definition of structural complexity alone.]
• 2019. Trinh, Tue. A tense question. Snippets 37: 106–107.
• 2019. Haida, Andreas, Tue Trinh & Chi Mai Luong. Interpretation of numerals under memory load by Vietnamese speakers. In Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics, edited by Nigel Duffield, Trang Phan & Tue Trinh, pp. 242–251. John Benjamins. [Abstract: Numerals show an ambiguity between a weak, ‘at least’ meaning and a strong, ‘exactly’ meaning. The Gricean approach takes the weak meaning to be basic and derives the strong meaning as implicature, thus assimilates numerals to other scalar items. The Fregean approach, in contrast, takes the strong meaning of numerals to be basic and derives the weak meaning via type shifting operations. This paper gives a brief summary of these two approaches, followed by a report on a dual-task experiment which is designed to test how Vietnamese speakers interpret numerals under different memory loads. The goal of this experiment is to replicate the results of Marty et al. (2013) which can be intepreted as supporting the Fregean approach. It turns out that this goal could not be achieved, and we give some speculations as to why it was not.]
• 2019. Duffield, Nigel, Trang Phan & Tue Trinh (eds). Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics. John Benjamins. [This volume has its genesis in a conference “Cao Xuân Hạo and Vietnamese Linguistics”, which was organized by Hoàng Dũng and Bùi Mạnh Hùng on behalf of the Linguistics Association of Ho Chi Minh City, and held in December 2017. As the conference title makes plain, the meeting was intended to celebrate the lifetime achievements of Professor Cao Xuân Hạo, whose landmark work in many diverse areas of linguistics – phonetics, lexical-semantics, syntax, pragmatics and translation theory – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organization. Three of the chapters in this volume were developed from papers presented at the conference. The other contributions were solicited from researchers in Vietnamese linguistics whose work is in the spirit of Professor Hạo’s oeuvre: bringing theoretical tools and cross-linguistic considerations to bear on specific issues in Vietnamese, whilst at the same time showing how Vietnamese data can shed light on wider problems in grammatical theory.]
• 2019. Trinh, Tue. The Edginess of Silence: A Study on Chain Linearization. De Gruyter. [Summary: Natural language differs from artificial ones in having the “displacement property,” allowing expressions to “move” from one position to another in the sentence. The mapping from syntax to phonology, therefore, must include rules specifying how objects created by movement are pronounced, or in technical jargon, how chains are linearized. One of these rules is Copy Deletion. The present study investigates the structural description of Copy Deletion. Specifically, it proposes a phrase geometric constraint on its application. The proposal is corroborated by empirical arguments based on distributional and interpretational facts concerning predicate clefts, NP-Splits, and head ordering patterns. The data are drawn from languages of different types and families including Chinese, English, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. The book, thus, contributes to our understanding of a crucial property of natural language and should be of relevance to readers who are interested in the cross-linguistic approach to Universal Grammar research.]
• 2019. Aldholmi, Yahya, Hamid Ouali & Tue Trinh. On complex adjectival phrases in Standard Arabic. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics 30: 79–91. [Abstract: In this paper, we present three puzzling observations concerning a class of adjectival constructions in Standard Arabic: (i) pleonastic definiteness, where an instance of definite morphology is semantically transparent, (ii) required resumption, where the absence of a resumptive pronoun leads to deviance, and (iii) case and agreement misalignment, where the domain for structural case assignment does not coincide with that for agreement marking. We then propose a resolution for these puzzles. Our proposal takes seriously the idea that semantics is purely interpretive, i.e. that the truth condition of the sentence is to be computed compositionally from its syntactic structure. The proposal includes two generalizations about case and agreement which turn out to concur to a large degree with widely accepted views on syntactic relations concerning these phenomena. The generalizations are (i) that arguments of 2-place predicates receive Accusative case and arguments of one-place predicates receive Nominative case, and (ii) that sentential nodes are barriers for agreement. Another conclusion of our proposal is that indices on pronouns can undergo movement which results in predicate abstraction and which exhibit properties of A bar movement.]
• 2019. Haida, Andreas & Tue Trinh.  A case for no Ks. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23. [Abstract: We present a novel observation about modified numerals and discuss how it may pose a problem for the syntactic representation of speaker’s belief, hence the grammatical derivation of ignorance inferences.]
• 2018. Trinh, Tue & Hubert Truckenbrodt. The Participant-Pronoun Restriction: English and Vietnamese. Proceedings of the 5th NAFOSTED Conference on Information and Computer Science. [Abstract: In English and many other languages, speakers and addressees must be referred to by pronouns. However, this is not true of Vietnamese. We propose that this difference is due to a parameterization of Tanya Reinhart’s Rule I. Our proposal requires that every root clause be analyzed as containing silent syntactic materials which encode information about the perspective of the sentence.]
• 2018. Trinh, Tue. Keeping it simple. Natural Language Semantics 26. [Abstract: Breheny et al. (2017) argue against the structural approach to alternatives. The empirical force of their argument comes mostly from challenges raised against Trinh & Haida (2015). This paper aims to respond to these challenges, showing how they can be met by a natural refinement of Trinh and Haida’s proposal which turns out to capture additional facts previously not accounted for. Another aim of this paper is to recount the debate with enough precision and explicitness in order to enhance understanding and facilitate future discussions.]
• 2018. Haida, Andreas & Tue Trinh. Questioning and time. Paper presented at GLOW 41. [Abstract: A past tense stative predicate usually licenses the inference that the state that predicate describes no longer obtains. However, this inference can be cancelled in certain types of questions. This squib proposes an account for this cancellation effect which is based on standard question semantics in conjunction with the assumption that interrogatives contains a speech act operator and can be exhaustified.]
• 2018. Trinh, Tue & Trang Phan. Deriving some observations on temporal interpretation in Vietnamese sentences. Paper presented at SEALS 28. [Abstract: We describe several facts concerning temporal interpretation of sentences in Vietnamese and present an account which is based on the analysis proposed in Abusch (1988) as it is interpreted by Heim (1994). Our account assumes that tense is explicitly represented in Vietnamese as a pronominal element. Thus, it constitutes supporting evidence for the pronominal theory of tense and for the universality of T as a syntactic category.]
• 2017. Trinh, Tue. When is not not not. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 24. [Abstract: Negated complements of negative implicatives in Vietnamese have a reading in which they are logically equivalent to their non-negated counterpart. We propose an analysis which predicts the distribution of such “pleonastic” occurences of negation and show that it can account for the distribution of another case of pleonasm in Vietnamese: pleonastic modals. The analysis assumes the possibility of multidominance and contains a proposal on the linearization of syntactic structure.]
• 2016. Trinh, Tue. Splitting friends, wives, and boxes of books. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 80. [Abstract: Cross-linguistic variation with respect to the pronunciation of topicalized verbs make up most of my argument for the Edge Condition (EC), a principle of chain linearization, in Trinh (2009, 2010). In section 5 of Trinh (2009), I argue that variation within Vietnamese with respect to the pronunciation of split NPs also supports EC. After the publication of that paper, I became aware of some additional facts about NP-Split in Vietnamese, which I then discussed in chapter 3 of my dissertation. I believe these facts and my analysis of them suffice to warrant presentation in a small but self-contained contribution. The present squib, which is a contribution to a Festschrift for David Pesetsky, is a long overdue result of that belief, and I am particularly happy about its venue of publication, as David Pesetsky’s guidance and support were essential in all of my works on this topic.]
• 2015. Trinh, Tue & Andreas Haida. Constraining the derivation of alternatives. Natural Language Semantics 23. [Abstract: Inferences that result from exhaustification of a sentence S depend on the set of alternatives to S. In this paper, we present some inference patterns that are problematic for previous theories of alternatives and propose some structural constraints on the derivation of formal alternatives which derive the observations.]
• 2014. Trinh, Tue. How to ask the obvious – A presuppositional account of evidential bias in English yes/no questions. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 71. [Abstract: English can express the basic meaning of a yes/no question in several ways, for example with or without sentential negation, and with or without subject auxiliary inversion. In this paper, we discuss how the presence of contextual clue with respect to one or the other answer to a yes/no question determines which formal variants of the question are felicitous. We then derive these syntax-pragmatics interactions from Heim’s principle of Maximize Presupposition, Stalnaker’s Bridge Principle and Grice’s Maxim of Manner, each formulated in a particular way, together with the assumption that the lexicon of English contains a silent evidential marker which exhibits familiar syntactic and semantic properties. This paper is a contribution to a Festschrift for Irene Heim.]
• 2013. Trinh, Tue. Das Vietnamesische und das Chinesische. In Das Mehrsprachige Klassenzimmer. Über die Muttersprachen unserer Schüler, edited by Manfred Krifka, Joanna Błaszczak, Annette Leßmölmann, André Meinunger, Barbara Stiebels, Rosemarie Tracy und Hubert Truckenbrodt. [This is a book chapter written in German which introduces the lay readers to some basic facts about Vietnamese and Chinese and thereby provides them with some knowledge of theoretical linguistics.]
• 2012. Trinh, Tue. MAIN: Vietnamese version. In Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives, edited by N. Gagarina, D. Klop, S. Kunnari, K. Tantele, T. Välimaa, I. Balciuniene, U. Bohnacker, J. Walters. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 56. [This is the Vietnamese version of a manual developed by the above cited authors which can be used to collect data on children’s acquisition of narrative skills.]
• 2012. Trịnh Hữu Tuệ. Một số ghi chú về Kinh Dịch. [Một bài viết ngắn nói về hai cách đánh số quẻ trong Kinh Dịch của Văn Vương và Thiệu Ung.]
• 2011. Trinh, Tue & Luka Crnič. The rise and fall of declaratives. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15. [Abstract: This paper argues for a new way of thinking about semantic and pragmatic effects of particular sentence intonation patterns. The main focus of the paper is on the so-called rising declaratives, i.e. sentences that have the surface structure of a declarative sentence but are pronounced with a rising pitch contour. Rising declaratives differ from both declaratives with a falling pitch contour and questions in their pragmatic effect. Our goal is to account for this difference. We propose that rising intonation contour is syntactically realized. Its semantic import is to determine the resolution of a variable in the speech act projection, i.e. rising intonation operates on speech acts. The pragmatic effects associated with rising declaratives are shown to follow from this minimal assumption and the independently motivated tenets of speech act theory.]
• 2011. Trinh, Tue. Nominal reference in two classifier languages. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15. [Abstract: In this paper, we first present observations that have been made concerning the distribution and interpretation of nominals in Mandarin Chinese and propose an account for them. We will then contrast Mandarin Chinese with Vietnamese, and show that differences with respect to the syntax and semantics of noun phrases between these two languages can be reduced to the fact that they differ minimally in lexical resource. Implications of the analysis for a theory of semantic variation are also discussed.]
• 2010. Trịnh Hữu Tuệ. Một số khái niệm trong triết học thời kỳ đầu của Ludwig Wittgenstein. [Một bài viết ngắn mang tính đại chúng đăng trên talawas nhằm mục đích giới thiệu tác phẩm đầu tay và được xuất bản duy nhất của W.]
• 2010. Trinh, Tue. Edges and linearization – A reply. Theoretical Linguistics 36. [This is a reply to commentaries on my 2009 paper “A constraint on Copy Deletion,” Theoretical Linguistics 35, linked below.]
• 2009. Trinh, Tue. A constraint on Copy Deletion. Theoretical Linguistics 35. [Abstract: One version of the copy theory of movement holds that syntactic traces are full-fledged constituents which undergo a PF-deletion rule. In this paper, I propose a constraint on this rule. The constraint says that the lower copy of a chain can be phonologically deleted only if it ends an XP. I show that this constraint, conjoined with proposals that have been made concerning phrase structure (Chomsky 1994) and the semantics of NP in classifier languages (Chierchia 1998), explains a variety of facts in Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish and Vietnamese.]
• 2009. Crnič, Luka & Tue Trinh. Embedding imperatives in English. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 13. [Abstract: Although it has generally been claimed otherwise (cf. Katz and Postal 1964, Sadock and Zwicky 1985, Palmer 1986, Rivero and Terzi 1995, Platzack and Rosengren 1998, Han 1998 among others), it holds that embedded imperatives exist in English. We describe their main characteristics and provide an account of these by relying on Schwager’s (2006) propositional analysis of imperatives, where imperatives are treated as modalized sentences. The imperative modal is thereby relativized to eventualities (cf. Hacquard 2006).]
• 2008. Crnič, Luka & Tue Trinh. Embedding imperatives. Proceedings of NELS 39. [This paper extends the centered world analysis of embedded epistemic modals proposed in Stephenson (2007) to account for embedded imperatives. A dissimilarity between epistemic and imperative modals in variability of modal force is accounted for by relying on Rullmann et al.’s (2008) analysis of Salish modals.]
• 2008. Trinh, Tue. Some approaches to complex demonstratives. [This is a squib written for a semantics class at MIT. It presents and compares various semantic analyses of determiner phrases headed by a demonstrative that has an NP complement.]
• 2007. Trinh, Tue. A case for no Case. Manuscript, MIT. [This is a squib written for a syntax class at MIT. It provides an explanation for several distributional in interpretational facts in Vietnamese based on the assumption that this language lacks Case/Agreement.]
• 2007. Trinh, Tue. Notes on tense interpretation. Manuscript, MIT. [This is a squib written for a semantics class at MIT. It presents the pros and cons of two theories of tense interpretation: the Priorian theory and Kusumoto (2005), and argues that the Priorian theory is empirically more adequate. However, that theory as such is not able to predict the later-than-matrix reading in adjunct clauses. A tentative solution is proposed which makes use of the idea that semantic interpretation proceeds cyclically.]
• 2006. Trinh, Tue. An analysis of transitive resultatives. Manuscript, MIT. [This is a squib written for a syntax class at MIT and later presented at the Maryland-MIT-Harvard-UMass-UConn Workshop in Formal Linguistics (ECO5). It proposes an analysis for transitive resultatives in Vietnamese and extends this analysis to English, thereby explaining some properties of English TRs. A major difference between English and Vietnamese is suggested to reduce to the fact that in English, [+EPP] on T must be satisfied by a DP, whereas in Vietnamese, an XP of any category can satisfy this feature.]
• 2005. Trinh, Tue. Aspects of Clause Structure in Vietnamese. Magisterarbeit, Humbold-Universität zu Berlin. [Zusammenfassung: In dieser Arbeit wird die Syntax zweier Satztypen des modernen Vietnamesischen untersucht: des Aussagesatzes und der Entscheidungsfrage. Erstens wird die Distribution temporaler und verbaler Elemente im Aussagesatz erklärt. Die Erklärung ist in Rahmen der minimalistischen Theorie formuliert und beinhaltet einige Annahmen über die Morphosyntax des Vietnamesischen. Von diesen Annahmen ausgehend wird dann eine Analyse für die Entscheidungsfrage gemacht, die ebenfalls mit Begriffen des Minimalismus formuliert wird. Es stellt sich aber heraus, dass diese Analyse in mancher Hinsicht inadäquat ist. Aus diesem Grund wird sie durch sprach- und konstruktionsspezifische Regeln ergänzt. Es wird angenommen, dass diese Regeln historisch entstanden sind und zur Peripherie gehören.]