Johanna,
I like the Aramaic examples. What I think they demonstrate is that serial verb constructions, which are themselves a non-homogeneous set, overlap with other types of verb construction. The Aramaic examples look very much aspectual, but knowing nothing about Aramaic, I can't say that that's what they are. However, aspectuals are one of the possibilities for serial verbs in some languages. In Ekpari (Benue-Congo, Idomoid), all aspectuals are serial verb constructions like other serial verbs in the languages, the one difference being that the aspectual must be the first verb in the series.
mahye adyu manyi
M M M H L L
I-sit drink water
I was drinking water
mabu adyu manyi
M H M H L L
I-return drink water
I kept drinking water
Another typical serial verb construction corresponds to a VP adverb in more configurational languages like English.
Yoruba
mo fi ada ge igi
M H L H H M M
I take cutlass cut wood
I cut the wood with a cutlass.
Mo fi Ebun fun O
M H L L H M
I take gift give you
I gave you a gift.
A third type is event serialization, also Yoruba
mo lO si Oja ra Eran
M M H M L M M M
I go to market buy meat
I went to the market and bought meat.
(si, by the way, is a verb too. The language has no prepositions.)
These event serializations can get much longer than this. The logico-semantic relationship between VPs relies not on morphosyntactic marking but on semantically and pragmatically governed inference.
I like your compound noun examples, which suggest that the -ing forms are functionally gerunds and that they are being used adverbially.
Herb
Thanks for the clarification on serial verbs, Herb. I wasn't thinking of
"go Xing" as a serial verb construction, though I may have made it seem
that way. I was grouping it with a broader range of constructions that
include two verb forms. I think (you can tell me if I'm right) that
serial verb constructions might be freer in the variety of verbs that
can occur second in the construction.
I never got as deep into Aramaic verbs as I wanted to, but there is a
hint of serial verbs in the modern language. I don't have the actual
forms handy, but in one spontaneous text narrated by a woman who had to
throw out some rice that had gone bad, the following occurred:
"I stood-up I took it, I stood-up I threw it out"
(both verbs are single stems; there is no overt subject pronoun, as it
is marked on the verb). I have a few other instances of "stand up"
acting as the first part of such a construction. Aramaic is an
extraordinarily rich language. I hope it lives long enough for somebody
to take it on in great depth. It has the bad luck of having Kurdistan
and northern Iraq as its homeland (the Christians that are mentioned in
the news about Iraq are Aramaic speakers).
I have been going back and forth on the "Xing" member of the "go Xing"
construction. Is it participle, or is it gerund? It seems gerund-like
in that it names the activity and, if there is an object, it is
preposed: "go house-hunting", "go berry-picking", not "go hunting
houses, go picking berries" (a different "go" construction!) Also, it
seems bad to use it as a pre-noun modifier, as we would the present
participle (or maybe not?): "?the house-hunting couple", "?the shopping
people" -- the first sounds much better than the second.
The aspectual character of the construction argues for the Xing as a
participle, but I believe it may be the "go" that supplies the necessary
path aspect. Cognitive Grammar analyzes many verbal constructions as
having the more schematic part ("go", in this case) supply a construal
that the other part lacks. So it could be that "go" supplies the path
semantics that forces imperfective scanning of the lexical verb. On its
own, a gerund would not have imperfective (sequential, frame-by-frame)
scanning; it would have summary scanning (holistic apprehension of all
frames at once).
More armchair linguistics!!
***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~ E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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