The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: 
A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang

Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen

doi:doi:10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12

Research Article |

| Peer-Reviewed

The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang

Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen^*

Published in International Journal of Language and Linguistics (Volume 14, Issue 4)

Received: 18 June 2026 Accepted: 1 July 2026 Published: 24 July 2026

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Abstract

This paper presents a functional-typological contrastive study of the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese, centred on the Japanese construction -teiru (ている) and the Vietnamese preverbal particle đang. Adopting a semantics-based tertium comparationis, it departs from a shared aspectual value - the on-going, in-progress reading - and traces how each language encodes it and distributes it across situation types. Every token is coded for situation type (after Vendler, with Kindaichi’s verb classes for Japanese) and realized aspectual meaning, and the results are arrayed in situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrices. The data span several registers: Vietnamese literary prose, Japanese expository, scientific and legal texts, bilingual journalism, parallel fairy tales, and the complete parallel text of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The central finding is an aspectual asymmetry. -teiru is polysemous, its value fixed by the situation type of its host verb (progressive, permanent-state, resultative, progressive⇄resultative-ambiguous); đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker that never reaches the resultative. The two coincide in the progressive and state zones but diverge sharply at the resultative boundary, where Vietnamese recruits đã and.rồi. On a single parallel text the resultative cell holds 30.7% of -teiru tokens but only 1.0% of đang tokens (χ² = 205.6, df = 1, p <.001). The asymmetry follows jointly from typology - agglutinating Japanese concentrates aspectual meanings in one inflected form, isolating Vietnamese distributes them across function words - and from the semantics of đang, which resists the fixed state that defines the resultative.

Published in	International Journal of Language and Linguistics (Volume 14, Issue 4)
DOI	10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
Page(s)	160-173
Creative Commons	This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright	Copyright © The Author(s), 2026. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Progressive Aspect, Resultative, -teiru, Đang, Contrastive Analysis, Linguistic Typology, Japanese and Vietnamese

1. Introduction

1.1. Aim and Theoretical Orientation

Every language must give speakers the means to locate a situation in the flow of time. This study addresses one narrowly delimited corner of that problem: the encoding of the progressive - a dynamic situation viewed as unfolding at a reference point - in two genetically unrelated, typologically contrasting languages. Agglutinating Japanese grammaticalizes the progressive through the verbal form -teiru (the gerundive -te plus the auxiliary iru), with the variants -teori (formal) and -tsutsuaru (written, durative-emphatic). Isolating Vietnamese expresses it with the preverbal function word đang (and its older, literary variant đương). In teaching and translation the two markers are routinely treated as equivalents; yet on the plane of aspectual semantics they do not coincide - -teiru is famously polysemous, đang comparatively homogeneous. It is this mismatch that the study takes as its object.

The work is conducted within a functional-typological framework. Time is treated as a grammatical-functional category, and the difference between the two languages is explained from their typological character: agglutinating Japanese encodes aspect morphologically on the verb, whereas isolating Vietnamese encodes it through function words, word order and context. Restricting the investigation to a single aspectual category - the progressive - while examining it across several functional styles (artistic prose; expository, scientific and legal texts; journalism; and parallel translated material) makes it possible both to describe one marker in depth and to test the stability of its aspectual values across registers.

1.2. The Object of Study and Its Motivation

Aspect reflects the internal temporal structure of a situation; within it, the progressive - a situation in mid-development at a reference point - is one of the most basic aspectual values, present in nearly all languages but encoded differently by type. Within each language both markers have been studied in depth: on the Japanese side a continuous tradition centred on -teiru and its dependence on verb class

[1-3]

, and on the Vietnamese side a comparably long discussion of đã/đang/sẽ

[4-7]

. Direct contrastive work at the level of aspectual semantics, however, remains scarce; the closest precedent is a study on this topic

[8]

. This gap, together with the typological value of placing an agglutinating language beside an isolating one, is the rationale for the study.

1.3. Scope

The study concentrates on the progressive, with -teiru and đang at the centre. Because the pivotal difference between the two markers lies at the boundary between the progressive and resultative readings, the scope is extended to that boundary - including the resultative use of -teiru and the Vietnamese devices (rồi, đã.rồi) that carry it - but excludes -teiru in modal-evidential constructions (to sareru, to mirareru, koto to naru), which fall outside aspect altogether.

1.4. Objectives and Research Questions

The study answers four questions:

1) How does -teiru express the progressive meaning, and how does the distribution of its meanings depend on the situation type of the verb?

2) How does đang express the progressive meaning, and how does it distribute across situation types?

3) Where do the two markers converge and where do they diverge, especially at the progressive-resultative boundary?

4) When -teiru yields a resultative meaning, what device does Vietnamese use in its place?

1.5. Method and Structure of the Paper

The study follows the method of contrastive analysis on the basis of corpus inspection, taking Japanese as the source language and Vietnamese as the language of comparison. The analytic frame is a functional-typological theory of tense and aspect: the tense/aspect dichotomy (after Comrie), the classification of situations (after Vendler, with Kindaichi’s verb classification for Japanese), and Smith’s two-component model of viewpoint and situation aspect. Each corpus unit is coded along two dimensions - situation type × aspectual meaning - and the results are compiled into a contrastive matrix for each language. Sections 2-3 set out the framework, previous research, corpus sources and coding scheme; Sections 4-5 describe -teiru and đang in turn; Section 6 carries out the contrast, culminating in parallel evidence from a single literary work; and Section 7 draws the typological conclusions.

2. Theoretical Framework and Previous Research

2.1. Tense, Aspect, and the Place of the Progressive

Tense is a deictic category locating a situation relative to the moment of utterance. The classic formalization is Reichenbach’s three-point system - speech (S), event (E) and reference (R) points - which, by separating R from S and E, accounts even for complex tense values

[9]

; building on this, Comrie distinguishes absolute from relative tense and stresses that the degree of grammaticalization varies greatly across languages

[10]

. Aspect, in Comrie’s definition, comprises the ways of viewing the internal temporal structure of a situation, the foundational opposition being between the perfective - viewing the situation as a complete whole - and the imperfective - looking into its internal development

[11]

A later relational model, that of Klein, proves especially useful for contrastive purposes

[12]

: it defines tense as the relation between topic time and the moment of utterance, and aspect as the relation between topic time and situation time. This permits a unified description of languages that grammaticalize aspect morphologically and of those that rely on function words and context, and it clarifies why both đang and -teiru are interpreted differently according to the lexical class of the predicate they accompany.

Within the aspectual system the progressive is a sub-type of the imperfective: it presents a dynamic situation as unfolding at the reference point. The study speaks of the progressive aspect, not a progressive tense, because neither -teiru nor đang locates a situation on the past-present-future axis; each specifies its in-progress character. The progressive must be distinguished from the resultative - the state holding after a situation is completed - and from the perfect/experiential, which links a past event to a present reference point. The opposition progressive ↔ resultative is the axis of the whole analysis, for it is exactly where -teiru and đang part ways.

2.2. Situation Types (lexical Aspect): from Vendler and Kindaichi to Vietnamese

The aspectual value of an utterance is determined not only by the aspect marker but also by the situation type (lexical aspect, Aktionsart) of the predicate. Vendler, with Dowty’s later formalization, divides situations into four classes

[13, 14]

by the features [±dynamic, ±telic] and [±durative]:

1) states (e.g. know, love) - static, homogeneous;

2) activities (e.g. run, read) - dynamic, atelic, durative;

3) accomplishments (e.g. write a letter) - dynamic, telic, durative; and

4) achievements (e.g. die, arrive, realize) - dynamic, telic but punctual.

These classes are identified by familiar syntactic-semantic tests, among which the ability to combine with the progressive form is itself a diagnostic.

Notably, before Vendler, Kindaichi had already classified Japanese verbs into four groups

[1]

, chiefly by how they combine with -teiru: (i) stative verbs (状態動詞: aru, iru), which largely do not take -teiru; (ii) continuative verbs (継続動詞: yomu, hashiru, kaku), which take -teiru for a progressive reading; (iii) punctual verbs (瞬間動詞: shinu, kekkon suru, ochiru), which take it for a resultative-state reading (shinde iru ‘is dead’); and (iv) fourth-class verbs (第四種動詞: sobieru, niru), existing only in the -teiru form and denoting a permanent, inherent state (nite iru ‘resembles’). This classification runs essentially parallel to Vendler’s (継続動詞 ≈ activities/accomplishments, 瞬間動詞 ≈ achievements, 状態動詞/第四種 ≈ states) and is the key instrument for explaining why one -teiru form yields different meanings, the reading being decided by the lexical aspect of the verb

[3, 15, 16]

On the Vietnamese side, a corresponding classification has been constructed by Nguyễn Hoàng Trung and serves as the direct basis for the analysis of đang

[6, 7]

. He treats aspect not as a location in real time but as a grammatical category of the predicate that directs attention to the internal temporal course of the situation, dividing situations into two large types: dynamic (with a whole-part structure, punctual or durative) and static (with a homogeneous whole-part relation). The crucial claim is that đang, as an imperfective marker, combines with dynamic situations and with static situations that admit change, but resists fixed, homogeneous states. This typology supplies the predicate criteria on which any contrast with the polysemous -teiru must rest, and it anticipates the đang matrix: massing in the activity → progressive cell and part of the stative → currently-existing-state cell, while leaving the resultative cell empty.

2.3. The Two-component Model and the Progressive-resultative Dichotomy

Smith synthesizes the two planes

[17]

in the two-component theory: the aspectual meaning of an utterance is the product of viewpoint aspect (perfective / imperfective / neutral) and situation aspect (Vendler’s situation types). The progressive is an imperfective viewpoint, and the interaction of these two components is the technical hinge of the whole contrastive problem.

This interaction explains the polysemy of the progressive marker. Over a durative situation (activity, accomplishment) an imperfective viewpoint yields a progressive proper. Over a punctual situation (achievement) - with no internal extent to be ‘viewed as on-going’ - the progressive is blocked and the marker is reinterpreted as a resultative state, the state holding after the event (hence shinde iru is ‘is dead’, not ‘is dying’). With accomplishment and gradual-change predicates the -teiru form is genuinely ambiguous between the two readings

[15, 16]

. The mechanism is universal, but its exploitation differs: Japanese lets a single -teiru carry both progressive and resultative; Vietnamese does not.

2.4. The Contrastive Framework and Japanese-Vietnamese Typology

The study takes the semantic plane as its tertium comparationis: it starts from a shared aspectual value - the progressive / in-progress meaning - then examines the formal devices each language mobilizes to express it and contrasts the distribution of meanings across those devices. This avoids the common error of ‘contrasting form with form’ and makes it possible to detect semantic zones that one language encodes while the other does not.

Two typological properties govern the entire contrast. Agglutinating Japanese grammaticalizes aspect morphologically: -teiru is bonded tightly to the verb and can carry a rich semantic network differentiated by verb class. Isolating, non-inflecting Vietnamese expresses aspect through function words (đang before the predicate, among others), word order and context, and the function word may even be omitted, leaving context to carry the meaning

[5-7]

. This predicts a typological asymmetry: Japanese concentrates many meanings in one polysemous form, while Vietnamese distributes them across distinct function words - đang for the progressive, rồi/đã for the resultative. That đang cannot express the resultative is not accidental: the resultative is a fixed state arising after an event, and đang resists precisely this kind of fixed, homogeneous state. Its empty matrix cell is thus predictable from the semantics of the function word, and the corpora’s differences of volume and register are handled as a variable of the contrast, not a defect.

2.5. Previous Research on the Progressive in Vietnamese and Japanese

For Vietnamese, the foundational position is that the language is organized around aspect rather than an Indo-European-style tense - a view associated with Cao Xuân Hạo, on which đã/đang/sẽ are aspectual/phasal markers rather than grammatical tenses

[4]

. On this footing, generatively oriented work has refined the system’s internal structure; đang has been analysed as a purely aspectual progressive marker, distinct from đã, which blends temporal and aspectual value

[5]

. The most comprehensive treatment, however, is that of Nguyễn Hoàng Trung: from a dissertation contrasting Vietnamese aspect with French and English, to a monograph on event structure and an introductory textbook, he builds an event-structure-based conception - including the dynamic/static classification and the claim about the combinatorial range of đang noted in §2.2

[6, 7, 18]

. Throughout, the Vietnamese literature largely stops at the syntactic-semantic plane; works contrasting đang directly with a marker of another language are sparse.

For Japanese, -teiru is among the most intensively studied objects in the grammar. Originating in Kindaichi’s four-way verb classification, the line was developed by Kudo into a tense-aspect system that also takes the textual plane into account

[1, 2]

. Debate centres on the polysemy of -teiru - progressive, resultative, perfect/experiential, habitual - and the mechanism distributing these meanings by verb class: a prototype-based account has been offered

[3]

, while others clarify the lexical-aspect determination of the reading and confirm the ambiguity with accomplishment predicates

[15, 16]

At the contrastive level the closest precedent is a contrastive study that shows that đang leans toward the progressive and toward transience, while -teiru additionally covers resultative state, habitual and experiential readings

[8]

. The present study inherits this observation but pushes it further in two directions: it tests the claim systematically on a situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrix across several corpora, and it fills the still-open question of the device that Vietnamese (rồi, đã.rồi) uses when -teiru carries the resultative.

The Japanese tradition continues along several lines bearing on -teiru. On acquisition, learners’ mastery of the progressive and resultative readings has been shown to follow verb class, in line with the Aspect Hypothesis

[19]

. On theory, Go Yō (呉揚) develops Kudo’s notion of ‘temporal boundedness’ (時間的限定性), focusing on the static predicates that yield the permanent-state reading

[20]

. On pedagogical grammar, a Japanese tense-aspect system for teaching has been proposed, built both on a semantic-domain description and on a Japanese-English contrast

[21, 22]

. A systematic lexical study of time-expressing vocabulary complements these accounts

[23]

. Together with the perfective/imperfective foundation, these lines reinforce the analytic frame of the study.

In Vietnamese, alongside work on aspect markers, the expression of time has been studied at the lexical and cognitive plane: temporal nouns and noun phrases as devices of temporal location

[24]

, and the metaphorical mapping from space to time

[25]

. These works do not address the progressive directly, but they show that Vietnamese distributes the expression of time across several classes of device - aspectual function words, temporal noun phrases, spatial metaphor - which helps situate the role of đang in the system.

At the contrastive level the most comprehensive work is a dissertation on the category of time (tense) in Japanese and its Vietnamese equivalents

[26]

; close to the present project, it treats ‘time’ broadly, whereas this study narrows to a single value, the progressive. At the typological level, a contrastive study of verbal tense in Chinese and Japanese offers a useful reference point: Chinese - also isolating, like Vietnamese - uses the durative particle 着 for the in-progress meaning, parallel to đang, while 了/过 take over other values

[27]

. Distributing aspectual meaning across several function words thus appears to be a general property of isolating languages. Taken together, the literature either treats ‘time’ broadly, focuses on lexical-cognitive devices, or describes -teiru and đang within each language separately; work that narrows to the progressive and contrasts the two markers systematically via a situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrix across several corpora remains sparse. That is the gap this study addresses.

3. Data and Methods

3.1. Corpus Sources

The study draws on a deliberately heterogeneous set of corpora spanning several functional styles, so as to describe each marker in some depth and to test the stability of its aspectual values across text types. Because each source carries its own bias, the seven sources are placed side by side to compensate for one another.

1) Vietnamese literary prose. 84 tokens of đang/đương extracted from the short stories of Thạch Lam

[28]

. This is the basis for the đang list. The edition used is a 301-page PDF (Tuyển tập truyện ngắn Thạch Lam [Short stories of Thạch Lam], Văn học Publishing House, 2016).

2) Japanese expository, scientific and legal-regulatory texts. 46 tokens of -teiru / -teori / -tsutsuaru drawn from Japanese expository, scientific and legal texts. This is the basis for the -teiru list. Such texts are rich in abstract resultatives (naru, sareru) but poor in the prototypical resultatives of concrete punctual verbs.

3) Bilingual journalistic data (2025). Paired đang--teiru items in journalistic register, supplying contemporary, register-controlled pairs.

4) A parallel novel. Parallel data from the novel 君の膵臓をたべたい (Kimi no suizō o tabetai, ‘I Want to Eat Your Pancreas’), Japanese original and Vietnamese translation, supplementing the prototypical resultative zone

[29, 30]

5) Parallel narrative prose. A collection of 20 bilingual Japanese-Vietnamese fairy tales (151 pages), supplying corresponding pairs in narrative style, especially for the resultative zone

[31]

6) Single-marker newspaper lists. Lists of individual -teiru and đang sentences from Vietnamese and Japanese newspapers, used for supplementary illustration.

7) A full parallel literary text. The complete parallel text of the novel ノルウェイの森 (Norwegian Wood, Murakami Haruki): the Japanese original (201-page PDF) and the Vietnamese translation (554-page)

[32, 33]

. This source is examined in its entirety and serves as the controlled, same-text verification in §6.8.

The combination of sources is purposeful. Expository-legal texts are rich in abstract resultatives (naru, sareru) but rarely report concrete events such as ‘die’, ‘marry’, ‘fall’ or ‘open/close’; artistic and narrative prose supply exactly those prototypical cases. Because the two principal corpora differ in volume and register, the matrix figures are read as distributional tendencies, not absolute frequencies; the full parallel novel (source g) was added to neutralize this register confound - same story, same situations, only the language differing.

3.2. Coding Scheme

Each corpus unit - a single token of -teiru or đang - is coded along two dimensions. The first is the situation type of the predicate: activity, stative, achievement, accomplishment (after Vendler; for Japanese, with Kindaichi’s verb classes). The second is the realized aspectual meaning: progressive, currently-existing/permanent state, goal-oriented progressive, resultative state, and dual (progressive⇄resultative ambiguous). The results are compiled into a situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrix for each language (§4.2 for -teiru, §5.2 for đang). For the large Norwegian Wood source (1,799 -teiru and 510 đang tokens) coding was done semi-automatically by lexical-aspect class, with borderline cases checked by hand; that matrix appears in §6.8.

Some units were excluded so that the lists contained only genuine instances of the category. On the Vietnamese side, 6 of 90 tokens were excluded - 5 instances of đảm đang (an adjective picked up in error by string-matching) and 1 truncated fragment - leaving 84 units. On the Japanese side, 15 -teiru units in modal-evidential constructions (to sareru, to mirareru, koto to naru), which express modality rather than aspect, were excluded, leaving 46 units. Throughout, situation types and lexical meanings were verified against standard Japanese pattern dictionaries, a Japanese-Vietnamese sentence-pattern dictionary and online lexical resources

[34-39]

4. The Progressive Aspect in Japanese (-teiru)

4.1. The -teiru System and the Principle of Polysemy by Situation Type

In Japanese the progressive has no dedicated marker; it is only one value of the form -teiru (the -te form plus the auxiliary iru), with variants -teori (formal) and -tsutsuaru (written, development-emphatic). The core property Kindaichi discovered is that the aspectual value of -teiru is not fixed but determined by the situation type of the verb

[1]

. In the two-component model (§2.3), -teiru imposes an imperfective viewpoint and the result depends on the predicate’s class. Four principal readings, corresponding to the four verb classes, are illustrated in (1)-(3): with continuative verbs (継続動詞) the progressive; with punctual verbs (瞬間動詞) the resultative state; with fourth-class verbs (第四種動詞) the permanent state; plus habitual and perfect/experiential readings with certain action verbs.

(1) 走っている / 本を読んでいる

hashitte iru / hon o yonde iru

‘is running / is reading a book’

(Constructed example; 継続動詞 ‘continuative verbs’, after Kindaichi 1950)

Analysis. hashiru and yomu are continuative verbs (継続動詞) - dynamic, durative situations with no internal endpoint; -teiru imposes an imperfective viewpoint on them and so yields the progressive ‘is ~ing’.

(2) 死んでいる / 結婚している

shinde iru / kekkon shite iru

‘is dead / is married’

(Constructed example; 瞬間動詞 ‘punctual verbs’)

Analysis. shinu and kekkon suru are punctual verbs (瞬間動詞), with the event occurring in an instant; lacking any extent to be ‘viewed as on-going’, -teiru is reinterpreted as a resultative state - ‘has died/married and is now in that state’.

(3) 似ている / 山がそびえている

nite iru / yama ga sobiete iru

‘resembles / the mountain towers up’

(Constructed example; 第四種動詞 ‘fourth-class verbs’)

Analysis. niru and sobieru belong to the fourth class (第四種動詞), appearing almost only in the -teiru form and denoting an inherent, permanent state; this is the clearest evidence that -teiru does not itself carry a progressive meaning.

4.2. The Distribution of -teiru Meanings in the Corpus

To test this principle against real data, 46 tokens of -teiru / -teori / -tsutsuaru from expository, scientific and legal texts were coded along the two dimensions situation type × aspectual meaning, giving Table 1.

Table 1. Distribution of -teiru by situation type × aspectual meaning, expository/scientific/legal corpus (n = 46). Fifteen -teiru units in the modal-evidential constructions to sareru / to mirareru / koto to naru are excluded as outside the category of aspect.

Situation type	Progressive	Permanent state	Goal-oriented prog.	Resultative state	Dual	Total
Activity	17	0	0	0	0	17
Stative	0	10	0	0	0	10
Achievement	0	0	1	5	2	8
Accomplishment	10	0	0	0	1	11
Total	27	10	1	5	3	46

This distribution confirms situation-type dependence. The progressive cell (27 units) is filled almost entirely by activity and gradual-change verbs (Examples 4-6); the permanent-state cell (10 units) by stative and fourth-class verbs (Examples 7-8); the resultative-state cell by punctual verbs (Examples 9-10); and, in expository text, -teiru additionally produces a dual cell with accomplishment predicates (Example 11) that đang lacks.

(4) 地球は太陽の周りを公転している。

Chikyū wa taiyō no mawari o kōten shite iru.

‘The Earth is revolving around the Sun.’

(Scientific corpus)

Analysis. kōten suru ‘revolve’ is a durative dynamic situation (継続); -teiru yields the progressive, equivalent to Vietnamese đang - a one-to-one correspondence in the progressive zone.

(5) 気候変動は生態系に深刻な影響を与えている。

Kikō hendō wa seitaikei ni shinkoku na eikyō o ataete iru.

‘Climate change is having a serious impact on ecosystems.’

(Expository corpus)

Analysis. ataeru ‘exert/give’ here describes an on-going, durative process; -teiru yields the progressive.

(6) お妃さまが水浴びしていると、蛙が.

Okisaki-sama ga mizuabi shite iru to, kaeru ga.

‘While the queen was bathing, a frog.’

(Sleeping Beauty, 20 bilingual Japanese-Vietnamese fairy tales, p. 30)

Analysis. mizuabi suru ‘bathe’ is a durative activity; -teiru yields the progressive, and the Vietnamese translation uses exactly đang - a prototypical one-to-one pair.

(7) 取締役は善管注意義務を負っている。

Torishimariyaku wa zenkan chūi gimu o otte iru.

‘Directors bear a duty of due care.’

(Legal-regulatory corpus)

Analysis. ou ‘bear (an obligation)’ denotes an existing state; -teiru yields a permanent state, and Vietnamese needs no aspect marker.

(8) 細菌はDNAを持っており、自己複製を行う。

Saikin wa DNA o motte ori, jiko fukusei o okonau.

‘Bacteria possess DNA and self-replicate.’

(Scientific corpus; 状態動詞)

Analysis. motsu ‘have/possess’ is a stative verb; -teori (the formal variant of -teiru) yields a permanent state.

(9) 日本の自動車産業は輸出の柱となっている。

Nihon no jidōsha sangyō wa yushutsu no hashira to natte iru.

‘Japan’s automobile industry has become a pillar of exports.’

(Expository-economic corpus; abstract resultative)

Analysis. naru ‘become’ is a change-of-state/punctual verb; -teiru yields a resultative state - ‘has become and now is’. This is the prototypical abstract resultative of expository text.

(10) 本規約はウェブサイト上に掲載されている。

Hon kiyaku wa webusaito-jō ni keisai sarete iru.

‘These terms are posted on the website.’

(Legal-regulatory corpus; passive resultative)

Analysis. keisai suru ‘post’ is a punctual verb; in the passive sareru + -teiru it yields a resultative state, ‘is in the state of having been posted’.

(11) 南極の氷床は毎年数千億トンが失われている。

Nankyoku no hyōshō wa maitoshi sūsen’oku ton ga ushinawarete iru.

‘Each year, hundreds of billions of tons of the Antarctic ice sheet are being lost.’

(Scientific corpus; progressive/resultative dual)

Analysis. ushinawareru ‘be lost’ is a change-of-state verb; with such predicates -teiru is ambiguous between progressive (‘is being lost’) and resultative (‘has been lost’), and only context resolves it.

4.3. The Prototypical Resultative and the Role of Corpus Design

A methodological note: although the resultative-state cell is filled (Examples 9-10), all its members are abstract resultatives with change-of-state verbs (naru, sareru). Expository-legal text rarely narrates concrete events such as die, marry, fall, open/close, so it does not supply the prototypical resultative of punctual verbs (瞬間動詞). This is why the parallel narrative corpus (the bilingual fairy tales) was added: there the progressive form appears with activity and posture verbs (Example 12), the resultative with punctual and change-of-state predicates (Examples 13-14).

(12) 狼が寝ているのが見えました。

Ōkami ga nete iru no ga miemashita.

‘.saw the wolf sleeping.’

(Little Red Riding Hood, 20 bilingual fairy tales, p. 6; progressive)

Analysis. neru ‘sleep’ here is a durative activity/state; -teiru yields the progressive, translated as đang ngủ ‘is sleeping’ - a one-to-one pair.

(13) その人と動物たちは石になって貯蔵庫にあります。

Sono hito to dōbutsu-tachi wa ishi ni natte chozōko ni arimasu.

‘The man and the animals had been turned to stone and lay.’

(The Hunter, ibid., p. 98; resultative ↔ đã)

Analysis. naru is a change-of-state event; the construction ~ni natte ~aru denotes the resultative state holding after the event, rendered in Vietnamese by đã (đã bị hóa đá ‘had been turned to stone’) - exactly the zone đang cannot reach.

(14) 魔女が木に座っていました。

Majo ga ki ni suwatte imashita.

‘The witch was sitting in a tree.’

(The Hunter, ibid., p. 98; posture - resultative state)

Analysis. suwaru ‘sit’ is a posture verb, close to 瞬間動詞; -teiru (here the past -teimashita) yields the resultative-state reading of posture, ‘is in a seated position’, translated by Vietnamese ngồi.

Placing the two corpora side by side, -teiru covers all the meaning cells - progressive, permanent state, resultative (abstract and prototypical), and the dual reading - yet always distributed by the situation type of the predicate. This full picture of -teiru is the basis for the contrast with đang that follows.

5. The Progressive Aspect in Vietnamese (đang)

5.1. The đang System and the Principle of Distribution by Situation Type

Unlike Japanese, Vietnamese expresses the progressive with an analytic function word - đang (variant đương) - placed before the predicate, uninflected and omissible when context is clear. Semantically đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker

[5]

: it views the situation as unfolding at the reference point. Its combinatorial range, per Nguyễn Hoàng Trung

[7]

, is fixed by situation type: đang combines with dynamic situations (progressive, Example 15) and with static situations that admit change (currently-existing state, Example 16), but resists fixed, homogeneous states (Example 17).

(15) Nhưng Nhung đang ngồi khâu áo như mọi khi ở trong buồng.

‘But Nhung was sitting sewing a shirt as usual in the room.’

(Thạch Lam, Bắt Đầu; activity → progressive)

Analysis. ngồi khâu ‘sit sewing’ is a durative activity; đang yields the progressive - the strongest cell of đang (activity → progressive).

(16) Nhưng anh đương ốm thế này thì về làm sao?

‘But how can you go home while you are this ill?’

(Thạch Lam, Người Bạn Trẻ; stative → currently-existing state)

Analysis. ốm ‘ill’ is a stative predicate but one that admits change (one can recover); đang/đương combines with it, yielding a transient currently-existing state.

(17) *Nó đang cao 1m70; *Tôi đang biết tiếng Nhật

(intended) ‘*He is being 1.70 m tall; *I am knowing Japanese’

(Constructed; fixed states block đang)

Analysis. cao ‘tall’ (a fixed dimension) and biết ‘know’ (a stable cognitive state) are fixed, homogeneous states; đang is blocked - confirming the combinatorial constraint stated by Nguyễn Hoàng Trung.

5.2. The Distribution of đang Meanings in the Corpus

The 84 tokens of đang/đương from the short stories of Thạch Lam were coded along the same two dimensions, situation type × aspectual meaning, as on the Japanese side, giving Table 2.

Table 2. Distribution of đang by situation type × aspectual meaning, Thạch Lam corpus (n = 84). Six of 90 tokens excluded: 5 of đảm đang (an adjective, not an aspect marker) and 1 truncated fragment.

Situation type	Progressive	Current. state	Goal-oriented prog.	Resultative state	Total
Activity	68	0	0	0	68
Stative	0	13	0	0	13
Achievement	0	0	2	1	3
Accomplishment	0	0	0	0	0
Total	68	13	2	1	84

đang is overwhelmingly concentrated in two cells: activity → progressive (68 units; Examples 18-19, 22) and stative → currently-existing state (13 units; Example 20). With achievement verbs it still yields a goal-oriented progressive, the situation advancing toward its endpoint (Example 21), not a resultative. Compared with -teiru, which spreads over five cells, đang occupies only three and leaves the dual cell empty.

(18) Ba người vào lúc ông bà Cả đang ăn cơm.

‘The three came in just as Mr. and Mrs. Cả were eating.’

(Thạch Lam, Đứa Con; activity → progressive)

Analysis. ăn cơm ‘eat (a meal)’ is a durative activity; đang yields the progressive.

(19) “Chàng đang nhìn mình”, Loan thấy thế.

‘“He is looking at me,” Loan felt.’

(Thạch Lam, Bắt Đầu; activity → progressive)

Analysis. nhìn ‘look’ is a durative perception activity; đang yields the progressive.

(20).cái lạnh ở đâu đến làm cho người ta tưởng đang ở giữa mùa đông rét mướt.

‘.a cold from somewhere makes one feel as if one is in the middle of a bitter winter.’

(Thạch Lam, Gió Lạnh Đầu Mùa; stative → currently-existing state)

Analysis. ở ‘be (in a state/period)’ admits change; đang yields a currently-existing state - a metaphorical statement about the weather.

(21).như thấy một sự gì êm đẹp đang mất đi mà không còn can đảm giữ lại được nữa.

‘.as if seeing something sweet slipping away, no longer having the courage to hold it back.’

(Thạch Lam, Tình Xưa; achievement → goal-oriented progressive)

Analysis. mất đi ‘be lost’ is an achievement (it has an endpoint); with đang the situation is viewed as advancing toward that endpoint (goal-oriented progressive), NOT as the resultative ‘has been lost’.

(22) Nền kinh tế đang phát triển.

‘The economy is developing.’

(2025 journalistic corpus; activity → progressive)

Analysis. phát triển ‘develop’ is a durative process; đang yields the progressive - a journalistic example parallel to Japanese 上昇している / 拡大している ‘is rising / is expanding’.

5.3. The Boundary of đang: The Absence of the Resultative

The striking point is that the resultative-state cell is almost empty (1 borderline unit) - not accidental, but a consequence of the semantics noted in §5.1: the resultative is a fixed state arising after an event, which đang resists. With achievement verbs - where -teiru yields the resultative - đang yields a goal-oriented progressive or a reading quite distinct from the resultative (Example 23). The resultative is carried in Vietnamese by other devices, rồi, đã.rồi, as the parallel pair in Example 24 shows. The single borderline unit (đang mở dở, Example 25) denotes an interrupted, unfinished action, not a completed resultative state, and so does not contradict the conclusion.

(23) Nó đang chết.

‘He is dying’ (progressive), NOT ‘he is dead’; the resultative requires chết rồi / đã chết.

(Constructed; contrast with 死んでいる, Example 2)

Analysis. with the achievement ‘die’, đang yields only ‘advancing toward death’ (dying), never the resultative ‘is dead’ of 死んでいる (Example 2); the resultative must use đã/rồi.

(24) 石になって貯蔵庫にあります。

Ishi ni natte chozōko ni arimasu.

‘Chàng cùng mấy con vật đã bị hóa đá nằm ở trong một cái hố.’ (Vietnamese translation)

(The Hunter, ibid., p. 98; resultative - Vietnamese uses đã; cf. Example 13)

Analysis. where Japanese uses ~ni natte ~aru for the resultative state, Vietnamese is obliged to use đã - evidence of a correspondence pair in the resultative zone that đang cannot cover.

(25).nhìn gói đồ ăn đang mở dở rồi cúi mình xuống nhặt.

‘.looked at the food parcel half-open, then bent down to pick it up.’

(Thạch Lam, Đói; borderline - interrupted action, not a completed resultative)

Analysis. mở dở denotes an action broken off midway (half-done), not a completed resultative state; this is the only borderline unit and does not contradict the conclusion that đang lacks the resultative.

Thus đang is a homogeneous progressive marker, distributed by situation type but never reaching the resultative - in clear opposition to -teiru. It is exactly this opposition that the contrastive section now examines.

6. The Japanese-Vietnamese Contrast

6.1. Contrasting the Two Distributions

Placing the two matrices (§4.2 and §5.2) side by side, cell by cell, yields Table 3.

Table 3. Cell-by-cell comparison of -teiru and đang. The last two rows mark the divergence; figures are token counts in the two corpora, not a comparison of absolute frequencies (the corpora differ in volume and register).

Aspectual cell	-teiru (n = 46)	đang (n = 84)
Progressive	27	68
State (permanent / currently-existing)	10	13
Goal-oriented progressive	1	2
Resultative state	5	1 (borderline)
Dual reading	3	0

The table reveals a split into two clear zones: a zone of convergence (the first three cells) and a zone of divergence (the last two).

6.2. The Zone of Convergence: Progressive and State

In the first three cells -teiru and đang run in parallel, both governed by situation type. With activity/continuative verbs both yield the progressive (Examples 4-6 ≈ 18-19, 22); with statives, a currently-existing state (Examples 7-8 ≈ 16, 20); with achievement verbs viewed as in-process, a goal-oriented progressive (近づいている ≈ đang tiến lại gần ‘is approaching’, Example 21). In this zone đang is the natural equivalent of -teiru, and the relation is one-to-one.

6.3. The Zone of Divergence: The Resultative and the Dual Reading

The distinction lies wholly in the last two cells. With punctual verbs (瞬間動詞), -teiru yields a resultative state (5 abstract units in the expository corpus, plus the prototypical readings of Examples 2 and 13), while the đang cell is almost empty (1 borderline unit). With accomplishment verbs, -teiru additionally produces a progressive⇄resultative dual reading (3 units, Example 11) that đang entirely lacks. In short, one -teiru form carries both progressive and resultative, đang only the progressive - the direct manifestation of the typological contrast of §2.4 and of the semantic basis of §5.1, đang working against precisely the fixed state that defines the resultative.

6.4. The Vietnamese Distribution: đang ↔ rồi / đã

The consequence is a one-to-many relation between -teiru and the Vietnamese devices, summarized in Table 4.

Table 4. The one-to-many mapping from -teiru to Vietnamese devices.

Meaning of -teiru	Typical verb class	Corresponding Vietnamese device
Progressive	継続 / activity	đang (Ex. 6, 15, 18)
Permanent state	第四種 / stative	đang or Ø (Ex. 16, 20)
Resultative state	瞬間 / achievement	đã,.rồi - not đang (Ex. 23, 24)
Dual (progressive⇄resultative)	達成 / accomplishment	resolved: đang (prog.) / đã, rồi (result.) (Ex. 26)

In the resultative zone, where Japanese uses -teiru, Vietnamese must use đã /.rồi, never đang (Examples 23, 24, 27). This is why Vietnamese has no dual cell: the progressive⇄resultative ambiguity of -teiru (as in 戸が開いている) is resolved already at the choice of function word - cửa đang mở (ra) ‘the door is opening’ versus cửa mở rồi / đã mở ‘the door is open’ (Example 26). What surfaces in Japanese as a polysemy needing contextual resolution is, in Vietnamese, encoded explicitly by đang ↔ rồi/đã.

(26) 戸が開いている

To ga aite iru.

cửa đang mở (ra) ‘the door is opening’ [progressive] / cửa mở rồi, cửa đã mở ‘the door is open’ [resultative]

(Constructed; Vietnamese resolves the ambiguity by đang ↔ rồi/đã)

Analysis. aku ‘open’ is a change-of-state verb, so -teiru is ambiguous (door opening / door already open); Vietnamese resolves the ambiguity at once through the opposition đang ↔ rồi/đã.

(27) 結婚している

Kekkon shite iru.

‘is (already) married’, not *‘is getting married (= holding the wedding ceremony)’

(Constructed; resultative → đã/rồi)

Analysis. kekkon suru is a 瞬間動詞 → -teiru yields the resultative ‘is married’; *đang kết hôn in Vietnamese can only mean ‘is holding the wedding’, so the resultative must use đã/rồi.

6.5. Situations Where Vietnamese Uses đang But Japanese Does Not Use -teiru

Beyond the shared cells of §§6.1-6.4, the two markers diverge in combinatorial range. First, Vietnamese uses đang where Japanese does not use -teiru: with adjectives and psychological-evaluative predicates, Vietnamese allows đang to mark the transience of a state (đang vui, đang buồn, đang bận ‘is (being) happy / sad / busy’), whereas Japanese uses adjectives (嬉しい, 忙しい) with no -teiru form (Example 28). For certain physiological states Japanese does use -teiru via change-of-state verbs (疲れている ‘is tired’, お腹が空いている ‘is hungry’), but for emotional adjectives it uses the bare adjective. In general đang has a wider combinatorial margin than -teiru here.

(28) 私は今とても忙しい。

Watashi wa ima totemo isogashii.

Tôi đang rất bận. ‘I am very busy right now.’

(đang + adjective ↔ Japanese uses an adjective, not -teiru)

Analysis. isogashii ‘busy’ is a stative adjective; Vietnamese marks transience with đang (đang bận), while Japanese uses the adjective directly, with no -teiru form and none needed - a zone đang covers but -teiru does not.

6.6. Situations Where Japanese Uses -teiru But Vietnamese Does Not Use đang

The reverse direction is far wider, as the polysemy asymmetry predicts: -teiru subsumes a series of meanings most of which do not correspond to đang. First, the habitual - 毎朝ジョギングをしている (Example 29) - where Vietnamese uses a frequency adverb (sáng nào cũng, thường, hay), not đang. Second, the experiential/track-record - 三回優勝している ‘has won three times’ - where Vietnamese uses đã. Third, the permanent state with fourth-class verbs - 似ている (Example 30), そびえている - where Vietnamese uses an adjective (giống, sừng sững), never *đang giống. Fourth, the resultative of posture and ‘wear/put on’ - めがねをかけている (Example 31), 立っている, 帽子をかぶっている - where Vietnamese uses a plain verb (đeo kính, đội mũ), đang shifting it to ‘is putting on’. Fifth, stable profession/relation - 銀行に勤めている (Example 32) - where Vietnamese uses làm, ở, đang not obligatory. All these zones, with the resultative of §6.4, are where đang does not appear and Vietnamese mobilizes other devices (đã, rồi, frequency adverbs, adjectives, plain verbs).

(29) 毎朝ジョギングをしている。

Maiasa jogingu o shite iru.

Sáng nào tôi cũng chạy bộ. ‘I jog every morning.’

(Habitual ↔ frequency adverb, not đang)

Analysis. -teiru here is habitual; Vietnamese does NOT use đang but a frequency adverb (sáng nào cũng, thường, hay).

(30) 兄は父によく似ている。

Ani wa chichi ni yoku nite iru.

Anh trai tôi rất giống bố. ‘My older brother closely resembles our father.’

(第四種 verb; permanent state ↔ adjective)

Analysis. niru is a fourth-class verb (第四種); -teiru is obligatory and denotes a permanent state; Vietnamese uses the adjective giống ‘resembling’, never *đang giống.

(31) 田中さんはめがねをかけている。

Tanaka-san wa megane o kakete iru.

Anh Tanaka đeo kính. ‘Mr. Tanaka wears glasses.’

(瞬間 verb; resultative ↔ plain verb)

Analysis. kakeru ‘put on’ is a punctual verb → -teiru yields the resultative state; Vietnamese uses đeo kính ‘wears glasses’, and adding đang would force the process reading ‘is putting them on’.

(32) 姉は銀行に勤めている。

Ane wa ginkō ni tsutomete iru.

Chị gái tôi làm ở ngân hàng. ‘My older sister works at a bank.’

(stable profession ↔ plain verb)

Analysis. tsutomeru in the -teiru form denotes a stable occupational state; Vietnamese uses làm (việc) ở. ‘works at.’, with đang not obligatory.

6.7. Other Vietnamese Devices Besides đang

Even within the progressive/present zone, đang is not the only device. Beside the variant đương (archaic/literary, cf. Example 16), Vietnamese uses: temporal-locating adverbs such as hiện nay, hiện giờ, bây giờ, lúc này ‘now’ - which locate the situation in the present (closer to tense than aspect) and may accompany or replace đang (Example 33); continuation adverbs such as vẫn, còn, vẫn còn ‘still’ (Example 34); and the unmarked construction, leaving context to carry the progressive (Nó ngồi đọc sách suốt buổi chiều ‘He sat reading all afternoon’). This again reflects the typological character: instead of a single inflected form, Vietnamese disperses time-aspect across many function words and adverbs, đang specializing in the progressive while the others add nuances of location, persistence or frequency. The semantic contribution of temporal adverbs has likewise been described for Japanese

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(33) Hiện nay, nền kinh tế đang phát triển nhanh.

‘At present, the economy is developing rapidly.’

(temporal locator hiện nay + đang)

Analysis. hiện nay is a present-locating adverb (closer to tense than aspect); it may accompany or replace đang, showing that Vietnamese uses lexical-temporal devices alongside the aspectual function word.

(34) Trời vẫn còn mưa.

‘It is still raining.’

(continuation adverbs vẫn / còn / vẫn còn)

Analysis. vẫn, còn, vẫn còn denote the persistence/continuation of the situation; they supplement or replace đang with a ‘still on-going’ nuance.

In sum, -teiru and đang overlap in the progressive-state zone but diverge in the resultative, dual, habitual and permanent-state zones: -teiru is a verb-class-dependent polysemous marker, whereas đang is a homogeneous progressive marker that cedes the remaining meanings to đã/rồi, frequency adverbs, adjectives and plain verbs. Both directions of asymmetry (§6.5, §6.6) trace back to the same typological source (agglutinating → concentration; isolating → dispersal) and the same semantic source (đang resisting the fixed state).

6.8. Parallel Evidence Within a Single Work (Norwegian Wood)

The matrices in §4.2 and §5.2 rest on two corpora differing in register and volume, so they reflect only distributional tendencies. To verify the resultative asymmetry on one and the same text, the whole of Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森) was examined - the Japanese original (201-page PDF, tokenized with MeCab) and the Vietnamese translation (554-page) - same story, same situations, only that the Vietnamese version was based on an English version to be translated. So differences in language can be seen between Japanese-English-Vietnamese. Even though translation was not made directly, the translator is Vietnamese native so his intuition on đang aspect is still the same.

On the Japanese side, all 1,799 tokens of -teiru/-teori were coded by verb class (Kindaichi) and their aspectual meaning derived, giving Table 5.

Table 5. -teiru across the entire Japanese original of Norwegian Wood (n = 1,799), coded by verb class. The resultative-state cell holds 552 units (30.7%), with concrete punctual verbs such as 座る, 立つ, 並ぶ, 着る, 寝る, 黙る, 入る, 残る.

Situation type	Progressive	Permanent state	Goal-oriented prog.	Resultative state	Dual	Total
Activity	962	0	0	0	0	962
Stative	0	259	0	0	0	259
Achievement	0	0	7	552	0	559
Accomplishment	0	0	0	0	19	19
Total	962	259	7	552	19	1799

Among 1799 token counted as -teiru, 136 tokens have 為る (the bleached suru) as their main predicate, previously flagged as needing checking. Splitting off the サ変 noun preceding 為る (noun + suru, or noun + を + suru), each token was reclassified by the noun’s meaning. Reclassification of the 為る group can be found in Table 6.

Table 6. Reclassification of the 為る group: activity nouns (話す ‘talk’, 勉強 ‘study’, 練習 ‘practice’) → progressive; state nouns (存在 ‘existence’, 心配 ‘worry’) → permanent; change-of-state nouns (混乱 ‘confusion’, 入院 ‘hospitalization’, 散乱 ‘scattering’) → resultative. Even within the サ変 block, -teiru spreads across all three meaning zones; the 25 resultative tokens fall in a zone đang cannot express.

サ変 noun (split before する)	Progressive	Permanent	Resultative	Total
Typical examples	話, 勉強, 練習, 食事	存在, 心配, 安心	混乱, 入院, 散乱	-
Token count	87	24	25	136

On the Vietnamese side, the whole 554-page translation yields 510 tokens of đang/đương in the aspectual category (after removing đương nhiên ‘of course’, đương đầu ‘to confront’, đương thời ‘at the time’, and tokens followed by a function word). Coded along the same two dimensions, this gives Table 7.

Table 7. Đang across the entire Vietnamese translation of Norwegian Wood (n = 510). The 5 tokens in the resultative cell are all change-of-state verbs (chết ‘die’, vỡ ‘break’) that, with đang, are read along the process line ‘is dying / is breaking’, so the resultative cell is in effect empty.

Situation type	Progressive	Current. state	Resultative state	Total
Activity	432	0	0	432
Stative	0	73	0	73
Achievement	0	0	5	5
Accomplishment	0	0	0	0
Total	432	73	5	510

Set side by side on one and the same work, the contrast is sharp. In the progressive and state zones the markers run in parallel: the progressive accounts for 53.5% of -teiru and 84.7% of đang; the permanent state for 14.4% and 14.3%. The difference falls entirely in the resultative cell - 30.7% for -teiru (552/1,799) but only 1.0% for đang (5/510). A chi-square test on the progressive and resultative cells gives χ² = 205.6 (df = 1; p <.001). On the same text, the translation transfers the whole resultative meaning of -teiru onto đã, rồi or a plain verb, never onto đang - the most direct evidence for the study’s central claim.

7. Conclusion: The Typological Differences Between Japanese and Vietnamese

This study has contrasted the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese within a functional-typological frame, taking semantics as the basis of comparison and using a situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrix across several corpora - literary prose, expository/scientific/legal texts, journalism, bilingual fairy tales, and the full parallel text of Norwegian Wood. The salient result: -teiru is a polysemous marker whose value (progressive, permanent state, resultative, dual) is fixed by the situation type of the verb, whereas đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker, distributed by situation type but never reaching the resultative. The two coincide in the progressive and state zones - a one-to-one relation - but diverge decisively in the resultative and dual zones; the divergence was verified on a single text in §6.8 (30.7% versus 1.0%).

The study’s most important contribution is to show that this divergence is not an isolated lexical fact about two markers but a predictable expression of two interlocking principles - one typological, one semantic - that together constitute the deep difference between the two languages in this domain.

The typological principle is one of concentration versus dispersal. As an agglutinating language, Japanese grammaticalizes aspect on the verb and can load a single inflected form, -teiru, with a network of meanings differentiated by verb class; the verb class, not a separate marker, selects the reading. Isolating Vietnamese cannot pack meanings into a bonded form and instead distributes them across independent function words - đang for the progressive, đã /.rồi for the resultative, frequency adverbs for the habitual, plain adjectives and verbs for permanent states and postures. The result is a systematic one-to-many mapping.

The semantic principle explains why the partition falls where it does. The resultative is, by definition, a fixed, homogeneous state arising after an event; and đang, as Nguyễn Hoàng Trung’s account of its combinatorial range predicts, resists precisely this kind of state. Its empty resultative cell is therefore not a gap to be explained away but a consequence of the marker’s own semantics. The two principles converge on a deeper generalization: a polysemy that Japanese leaves to context is, in Vietnamese, resolved in advance at the moment of choosing the function word. The ambiguity that -teiru tolerates (戸が開いている ‘the door is opening / is open’) cannot even arise in Vietnamese, since the choice between đang and rồi/đã forces commitment to one reading from the start - a difference in where in the clause each language resolves aspectual meaning.

These results bear on Japanese-Vietnamese teaching and translation. Treating đang and -teiru as fixed equivalents is correct only in the progressive zone; in the resultative zone it produces error (死んでいる is not ‘is dying’ but ‘is dead’). Learners and translators must identify the situation type of the verb to select the right device: keep đang for the progressive, but switch to đã /.rồi for the resultative of -teiru with punctual verbs.

The study also has its limitations. The two principal corpora differ in volume, so the figures reflect distributional tendencies rather than absolute frequencies; and the resultative cell of -teiru in the expository corpus consists mainly of abstract resultatives, though the full parallel survey of Norwegian Wood in §6.8 supplies prototypical ones. Extensions include systematically collecting the rồi / đã / xong tokens to build a complete Vietnamese counterpart matrix, exploiting parallel corpora to quantify the resultative-zone correspondence pairs, and extending the survey to neighbouring aspectual values (perfect, habitual) and to the other means of expressing time.

Abbreviations

PROG	Progressive
RES	Resultative
PFV	Perfective
N	Number of Tokens
χ²	Chi-square Statistic
Df	Degrees of Freedom
§	Section

Author Contributions

Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Data Availability Statement

The data supporting the outcome of this research work has been reported in this manuscript. The parallel-corpus token counts and coding spreadsheets are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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Nguyen, T. H. D. (2026). The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 14(4), 160-173. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12

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Nguyen, T. H. D. The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang. Int. J. Lang. Linguist. 2026, 14(4), 160-173. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12

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Nguyen THD. The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang. Int J Lang Linguist. 2026;14(4):160-173. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12

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@article{10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12,
  author = {Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen},
  title = {The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: 
A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang},
  journal = {International Journal of Language and Linguistics},
  volume = {14},
  number = {4},
  pages = {160-173},
  doi = {10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12},
  eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20261404.12},
  abstract = {This paper presents a functional-typological contrastive study of the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese, centred on the Japanese construction -teiru (ている) and the Vietnamese preverbal particle đang. Adopting a semantics-based tertium comparationis, it departs from a shared aspectual value - the on-going, in-progress reading - and traces how each language encodes it and distributes it across situation types. Every token is coded for situation type (after Vendler, with Kindaichi’s verb classes for Japanese) and realized aspectual meaning, and the results are arrayed in situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrices. The data span several registers: Vietnamese literary prose, Japanese expository, scientific and legal texts, bilingual journalism, parallel fairy tales, and the complete parallel text of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The central finding is an aspectual asymmetry. -teiru is polysemous, its value fixed by the situation type of its host verb (progressive, permanent-state, resultative, progressive⇄resultative-ambiguous); đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker that never reaches the resultative. The two coincide in the progressive and state zones but diverge sharply at the resultative boundary, where Vietnamese recruits đã and.rồi. On a single parallel text the resultative cell holds 30.7% of -teiru tokens but only 1.0% of đang tokens (χ2 = 205.6, df = 1, p đang, which resists the fixed state that defines the resultative.},
 year = {2026}
}

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TY  - JOUR
T1  - The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: 
A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang
AU  - Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen
Y1  - 2026/07/24
PY  - 2026
N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
DO  - 10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
T2  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JF  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JO  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
SP  - 160
EP  - 173
PB  - Science Publishing Group
SN  - 2330-0221
UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
AB  - This paper presents a functional-typological contrastive study of the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese, centred on the Japanese construction -teiru (ている) and the Vietnamese preverbal particle đang. Adopting a semantics-based tertium comparationis, it departs from a shared aspectual value - the on-going, in-progress reading - and traces how each language encodes it and distributes it across situation types. Every token is coded for situation type (after Vendler, with Kindaichi’s verb classes for Japanese) and realized aspectual meaning, and the results are arrayed in situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrices. The data span several registers: Vietnamese literary prose, Japanese expository, scientific and legal texts, bilingual journalism, parallel fairy tales, and the complete parallel text of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The central finding is an aspectual asymmetry. -teiru is polysemous, its value fixed by the situation type of its host verb (progressive, permanent-state, resultative, progressive⇄resultative-ambiguous); đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker that never reaches the resultative. The two coincide in the progressive and state zones but diverge sharply at the resultative boundary, where Vietnamese recruits đã and.rồi. On a single parallel text the resultative cell holds 30.7% of -teiru tokens but only 1.0% of đang tokens (χ2 = 205.6, df = 1, p đang, which resists the fixed state that defines the resultative.
VL  - 14
IS  - 4
ER  -

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Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen

Faculty of Literature, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam;Japanese Department, FPT University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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http://orcid.org/0009-0002-2850-6495

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Nguyen, T. H. D. (2026). The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 14(4), 160-173. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12

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ACS Style

Nguyen, T. H. D. The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang. Int. J. Lang. Linguist. 2026, 14(4), 160-173. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12

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AMA Style

Nguyen THD. The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang. Int J Lang Linguist. 2026;14(4):160-173. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12

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@article{10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12,
  author = {Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen},
  title = {The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: 
A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang},
  journal = {International Journal of Language and Linguistics},
  volume = {14},
  number = {4},
  pages = {160-173},
  doi = {10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12},
  eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20261404.12},
  abstract = {This paper presents a functional-typological contrastive study of the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese, centred on the Japanese construction -teiru (ている) and the Vietnamese preverbal particle đang. Adopting a semantics-based tertium comparationis, it departs from a shared aspectual value - the on-going, in-progress reading - and traces how each language encodes it and distributes it across situation types. Every token is coded for situation type (after Vendler, with Kindaichi’s verb classes for Japanese) and realized aspectual meaning, and the results are arrayed in situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrices. The data span several registers: Vietnamese literary prose, Japanese expository, scientific and legal texts, bilingual journalism, parallel fairy tales, and the complete parallel text of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The central finding is an aspectual asymmetry. -teiru is polysemous, its value fixed by the situation type of its host verb (progressive, permanent-state, resultative, progressive⇄resultative-ambiguous); đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker that never reaches the resultative. The two coincide in the progressive and state zones but diverge sharply at the resultative boundary, where Vietnamese recruits đã and.rồi. On a single parallel text the resultative cell holds 30.7% of -teiru tokens but only 1.0% of đang tokens (χ2 = 205.6, df = 1, p đang, which resists the fixed state that defines the resultative.},
 year = {2026}
}

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TY  - JOUR
T1  - The Progressive Aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese: 
A Functional-Typological Contrastive Study of -teiru and Đang
AU  - Thuy Huong Doan Nguyen
Y1  - 2026/07/24
PY  - 2026
N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
DO  - 10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
T2  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JF  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JO  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
SP  - 160
EP  - 173
PB  - Science Publishing Group
SN  - 2330-0221
UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20261404.12
AB  - This paper presents a functional-typological contrastive study of the progressive aspect in Japanese and Vietnamese, centred on the Japanese construction -teiru (ている) and the Vietnamese preverbal particle đang. Adopting a semantics-based tertium comparationis, it departs from a shared aspectual value - the on-going, in-progress reading - and traces how each language encodes it and distributes it across situation types. Every token is coded for situation type (after Vendler, with Kindaichi’s verb classes for Japanese) and realized aspectual meaning, and the results are arrayed in situation-type × aspectual-meaning matrices. The data span several registers: Vietnamese literary prose, Japanese expository, scientific and legal texts, bilingual journalism, parallel fairy tales, and the complete parallel text of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. The central finding is an aspectual asymmetry. -teiru is polysemous, its value fixed by the situation type of its host verb (progressive, permanent-state, resultative, progressive⇄resultative-ambiguous); đang is a comparatively homogeneous progressive marker that never reaches the resultative. The two coincide in the progressive and state zones but diverge sharply at the resultative boundary, where Vietnamese recruits đã and.rồi. On a single parallel text the resultative cell holds 30.7% of -teiru tokens but only 1.0% of đang tokens (χ2 = 205.6, df = 1, p đang, which resists the fixed state that defines the resultative.
VL  - 14
IS  - 4
ER  -

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