Tue Trinh

Research Fellow
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

I am a research fellow ("wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter") at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. My current research interests include syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the relationship between the three. I completed the MIT graduate program for linguistics in 2011. My dissertation (PDF, 9.1MB) is concerned with how grammar determines the phonological consequence of syntactic dislocation.

My email address is trinh.tue@hu-berlin.de. Here is my CV (updated 10/2012).

Here are some downloadable papers:

• Nominal Reference in Two Classifier Languages. (2011) This paper appears in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15. It proposes an account for some observations concerning the distribution and interpretation of nominals in Chinese and Vietnamese, arguing that differences between the two languages can be reduced to the fact that they differ minimally in lexical resource. The paper also discusses some implications for a theory of semantic variation.
• On the Rise and Fall of Declaratives. (2011) This paper is co-authored by Luka Crnic and appears in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15. It proposes that rising intonation contour determines the interpretation of a syntactically realized speech act projection. The pragmatic effects associated with rising declaratives are shown to follow from this assumption and independently motivated tenets of speech act theory.
• Edges and Linearization - A Reply. (2010) This paper appears in Theoretical Linguistics and is a reply to the various commentaries on my (2009) paper in the same journal (linked below).
• A Constraint on Copy Deletion. (2009) This paper is a target article in Theoretical Linguistics. It proposes a structural condition on the rule of Copy Deletion, which says that the lower copy of a chain can be phonologically erased only if it ends an maximal projection. I show that this constraint, conjoined with proposals that have been made concerning phrase structure and the semantics of NP in classifier languages, explains a variety of facts in Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish and Vietnamese.
• Embedding Imperatives. (2008) This paper is co-authored by Luka Crnic and appears in the Proceedings of NELS 39. It provides a series of novel observations which show that imperatives can be genuinely subordinated in English, contrary to what many have assumed. An analysis for embedded imperatives is developed which takes imperatives to be modal sentences.
• A Case for no Case. (2007) This is a squib I wrote in my second semester syntax class. It tries to explain a number of facts about Vietnamese on the assumption that there is no abstract Case in this language.