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How to Find Serial Verbs in English

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How to Find Serial Verbs in English JOHN R. ROBERTS SIL International 1. Introducing Serial Verb Constructions Trask (1993:251-252) describes a serial verb construction (SVC) as: “A construction in which what appears to be a single clause semantically is expressed syntactically by a sequence of juxtaposed separate verbs, all sharing the same subject or agent but each with its own additional arguments, without the use of overt coordinating conjunctions.” Trask gives (1a-b) as examples of typical SVCs from the West African languages of Yoruba and Vagala. (1) a. Yoruba (West African) ó mú ìwé wá 3sg took book came „He brought the book.‟ b. Vagala (West African) ù kpá kíyzèé mòng ówl 3sg take knife cut meat „He cut the meat with a knife.‟ In a more recent cross-linguistic typological study, Aikhenvald (2006) says: “A serial verb construction (SVC) is a sequence of verbs which act together as a single predicate, without any overt marker of coordination, subordination, or syntactic dependency of any sort. Serial verb constructions describe what is conceptualized as a single event. They are monoclausal; their intonational properties are the same as those of a monoverbal clause, and they have just one tense, aspect and polarity value. SVCs may also share core and other arguments. Each component of an SVC must be able to occur on its own. Within an SVC, the individual verbs may have same, or different, transitivity values.” Aikhenvald (2006:1) also says SVCs are widespread in Creole languages, in the languages of West Africa, Southeast Asia (Chinese, Thai, Khmer, etc.), Amazonia, Oceania, and New Guinea. However, Dixon (2006) notes that while SVCs are found in perhaps one-third of the languages of the world, there appear to be none in Europe or north or central Asia, and rather few in North America or Australia. In this article we will show how SVCs can be found in English.1 But first we should become more acquainted with SVCs. Matthews and Yip (1994:142) say that the SVC is one of the most important and produc- tive patterns in Cantonese syntax. They say an SVC in Cantonese is a simple concatenation of verbs. The Cantonese examples in (2b) has three verbs concatenated together, but note that the English translation for (2b) has only one verb. Cantonese also has specialized SVCs where the first verb in the series has a particular function, e.g. to add an „oblique‟ argument (instrument, distribution, benefaction, etc.), to express direction of the motion, or completion of the event. Similar examples of SVCs for Mandarin are given in (3). (2) Cantonese (Matthews and Yip, 1994:143) a. Bātyùh ngóhdeih heui tái hei rather 1pl go see film „Let‟s go and see a film.‟ 1 I want to thank Robert Van Valin for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 2 How to Find Serial Verbs in English b. Ngóh tīngyaht fēi heui gin-gūng 1sg tomorrow fly go see-work „I‟m flying to an interview tomorrow.‟ (3) Mandarin a. Tā jiāo wŏ xĭe zì 3sg teach 1sg write characters „She teaches me to write characters.‟ b. Wŏ qù măi shū 1sg go buy book(s) „I‟m going to buy books.‟ Amele (Papuan)2 also has productive and extensive SVCs. These comprise verb stems concatenated in a series. (4a), for example, has four verbs concatenated in a series. The first three are marked with the serial verb morpheme -i/-u and the last verb is marked with full independent verb inflection. In addition, the second verb in the series, ehudi „take him‟, is marked with the 3sg direct object suffix -ud. The first three verbs are not marked with any subject agreement morphology, so the subject marked on the final verb applies to all of these verbs. (4b) has five verbs in a series with madesin „they(du) said‟ as the final verb in the series. In addition the verb feeadi „they(du) greeted them‟ is marked with the 3pl direct object marker -ad. Amele also has specialized SVCs where the last verb in the series has a particular function, e.g. to express direction of the motion, various aspectual notions, or enumeration of the event (twice, thrice, etc.). (4) Amele (Papuan) a. Age hew-i eh-ud-i ah-u n-ein. 3pl hold-(SS) take-3sg.DO-(SS) bring-(SS) come down-3pl.SU.REMP „They arrested him and brought him down. b. Ale fee-ad-i co-nola sul-i u uta-i 3du greet-3pl.DO-(SS) lips-3du.POSR lift.up-(SS) get.(SS) call-(SS) mad-esin, “… say-3du.SU.REMP „They(du) greeted them and in a loud voice said, “…. Seimat is an Austronesian language of the Admiralties family. It is spoken by approximately 1,200 people living in the Ninigo Islands, which is part of Manus province in Papua New Guinea. Wozna and Wilson (2005:54-59) say that SVCs in Seimat comprise sequences of two, three or four verbs which share nominal arguments (both subject and object) and are all within the scope of the verb inflection marked on the final verb in the series, such as imperative or purpose. Some examples are given in (5). Seimat also has specialized SVCs where the first verb in the series has a particular function, e.g. to express direction of the motion, or causation, or manner. (5) Seimat (Austronesian; Wozna and Wilson, 2005:54-59) a. Laha apuha kak pax-ai waliko. 3pl meet speak look-TRANS something „They met, spoke and looked at things. b. Teka seilon tu-tu tum-i xau lol koti siponi some people RED-stand end-POSR barrier wade cut close mat-e xau. front-POSR barrier 2 Amele is a Papuan language spoken by approximately 6,000 people living in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea (see Roberts 1987). John R. Roberts 3 „The people standing at the end of the barrier, waded (through the water), cut (across the front of the barrier) and closed off the front of the barrier.‟ Verhaar (1995:97-130) describes the range of SVCs that can be found in Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea. In structural terms the two verbs in series in (6a) are both intransitive, in (6b) the first verb is transitive and the second is intransitive, and in (6c) the first verb is intransitive and the second verb is transitive. It is apparently not possible to have two trans- itive verbs in an SVC in Tok Pisin. (6) Tok Pisin (PNG) a. Dispela pisin i-flai i-go na i-no kam bek. this bird fly go and not come back „This bird flew away and didn‟t come back.‟ b. Ol i-karim kaikai i-kam. 3pl carry.TRANS food come „They carried the food this way.‟ c. Na em i-go pulimapim wara long skin meme. and 3sg go fill.TRANS water into skin goat „And she went to fill the goat skin with water.‟ The standard definition of an SVC (as in Trask, 1993, for example) is that it comprises a sequence of juxtaposed verbs sharing the same subject or agent. However, SVCs readily occur where the verbs in the series have different subjects. In each of the examples in (7a-d) the subject of the second verb is the object of the first verb. (7) a. Yoruba (W. Africa; Bamgboṣe, 1974; tone not shown) olu ti ɔmɔ naa šubu. Olu push child the fall „Olu pushed the child down.‟ (lit. „Olu pushed the child and it fell.‟) b. Cantonese Ngóh diu goh bòh lohk heui. 1sg throw CL ball down go „I threw the ball down.‟( lit. „I threw the ball and it went down.‟) c. Tok Pisin (PNG) Ol i-sutim pik i-dai. 3pl shoot.TRANS pig die „They shot the pig dead.‟ (lit. „They shot the pig and it died.‟) d. Seimat (Austronesian; Wozna and Wilson, 2005:57) Ti ipong nga tahuni ha-paxe. at night 1sg smoke CAUS-dry „At night I dried (the pandanus) by smoking it.‟ (lit. „At night I smoked the pandanus and caused it to dry.‟) In §2 we will first look at some of the common functions of SVCs. Then in §0 -§7 we will characterize the typical properties of SVCs in morphosyntactic and semantic terms. These observations and characterizations are drawn mainly from Kroeger (2004), and Dixon (2006) has a similar set of characterizations. After this, we will discuss how best to represent the syntactic structure of SVCs. Specifically in §8 we will show that a constituent structure-based approach, as in a generative grammar type of framework3, is inadequate to account for the 3 Hornstein et al. (2005:173) give [CP Spec C [TP Spec T [vP SU [v′ v[VP V OB ] ] ] ] ] as the current basic structure of the sentence in Minimalism (Chomsky 1995), where T stands for tense. This is still fundamentally the S → NPSU VP „universal‟ structure of sentences advocated in Chomsky (1957:27). 4 How to Find Serial Verbs in English syntactic structure of SVCs. Instead, we show that the syntactic function-based approach of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (see Van Valin and LaPolla 1997, Van Valin 2005) provides a more adequate and more universally applicable account of SVC syntactic structure. Finally, in §9 we show how the application of an RRG analysis to so-called „phase verb constructions‟4 in English reveals that they have the same semantic and syntactic properties as SVCs. 2. Functions of the SVC In an SVC the two (or more) verbs normally function together to express a single complex event.
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