Theme, subject and thematic reduction in Vietnamese. A comparison with French

This paper investigates theme(s)-subject constructions in Vietnamese and compares them with some similar constructions in French. We focus in particular on their preverbal thematic domain whose structure is governed by semantic relations between the initial NPs. The formation of a complex NP, a strategy used in case of thematic incompatibility between preverbal NPs, restores the proximity between them by reducing the thematic part of the utterance. We adopt an analysis which combines micro-syntactic and macro-syntactic levels and argue that the semantic network established within the thematic area is more significantly reinforced by syntactic relations in French than in Vietnamese.