Trang Phan is currently a lecturer of Vietnamese language and linguistics at VNU University of Languages & International Studies, Vietnamese National University Hanoi. Phan obtained her PhD from University of Sheffield (England) in 2013 on the structure and acquisition of Vietnamese verbal aspect. From 2014 to 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher of the Cartographic Syntax project at Ghent University (Belgium), working on various aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure in a crosslinguistic perspective, including the position of Vietnamese with respect to the NP/DP parameter, the prodrop parameter, and the topic-prominent/subject-prominent parameter. From 2019 to 2021, Phan was the principal investigator of the project on the Nanosyntax of Vietnamese tense and aspect funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED). From 2020 to 2021, Phan was a visiting scholar at Harvard Yenching Institute (Cambridge, USA), working on how Vietnamese classifiers, plurals, and articles update our current understanding of classifier languages. In addition to having papers published at well-established linguistic journals and publishers, Trang Phan is the co-editor of the volume Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics (2019) and the JSEALS special issue Vietnamese Linguistics: State of the Field (2022).
‘There is tense in “tenseless” languages. This book investigates key aspects of the clause structure of an understudied language in a remarkably clear and insightful way. It’s a beautiful example of the richness of modern generative linguistics. Also Vietnamese now becomes a protagonist in the exciting debate on the nature of crosslinguistic variation.’ - Professor Gennaro Chierchia, Harvard University. ‘This book is of a very high value, not just for researchers specializing in Vietnamese linguistics, but clearly for all theoretical linguists. Vietnamese is a language of a very specific type; it is an analytic language with no inflection typically wearing its logical structure on its sleeves. As such, results arrived at for Vietnamese will very often have direct repercussions for the analysis of other languages as well.’ - Prof. Dr. Daniel Hole, University of Stuttgart