This dissertation focuses on the interaction between definiteness and number in Vietnamese noun phrases, as reflected through the behavior and interpretation of the two pluralizers cac and nh1EEFng. First, I propose a unified structure for Vietnamese noun phrases in which cac/nh1EEFng are quantifier-like and occupy a Quantity head. Their distributional properties are accounted for by competition between heads (cac/nh1EEFng compete with Nums and most Qs on the Quantity head which is higher than the CL head) and by their c-selection (nh1EEFng requires restriction on the noun phrase because it semantically signals a partitive relation and thus selects for a CP, while cac, like Nums and other Qs, takes a ClP as complement). Meanwhile, their interpretations are accounted for by the properties of the complements they take and the feature content of each head. Second, I report the results from three experiments on the comprehension of singular and plural definite noun phrases by Vietnamese children ages 3 to 7, as well as adults. Contra results from English and Spanish, Vietnamese children in Experiment 1 and 2 make few definiteness errors, instead struggling with number, casting doubt on a universal difficulty with definiteness. In particular, during an act-out task, children acquiring languages with definite determiners and grammatical number (English, Spanish) sacrifice definiteness in favor of number, while those acquiring languages like Vietnamese prioritize definiteness, resulting in number errors. However, Experiment 3 uses a picture selection task showing that Vietnamese-speaking children do have number knowledge, specifically knowledge of the plurality of cac/nh1EEFng, and that they prioritize number over definiteness in this specific design. I argue that crosslinguistic differences in the acquisition of number and definiteness arise from how children integrate information from number and definiteness, which is task-dependent and language-specific.
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