[Fair warning to list readers: this one is theory-ish, and has no
pedagogical utility]

 

Bill,

 

And under the same warning.  In some languages with serial verbs that
distinction, finite vs. dependent, is important to the distinction.
Yoruba has a high tone prefix that functions like an infinitive marker,
and if the second of two verbs has that prefix it is dependent and not
serial.  It can have its own tense marking and negation, for example,
which a serial verb can't.  One of the interesting questions that comes
up in serial verb languages, especially of the Khmer and Mandarin sort,
is whether there is a special category of verbs that have limited
distribution, getting used only with other verbs but never alone for
example.  In West Africa there are clear cases of languages that have
prepositions and clear cases of languages in which what correspond to
prepositions in English are verbs.  I think the latter can be said
Mandarin and perhaps Khmer.  But some of those verbs that have
prepositional meanings are defective in that they must be a first or a
non-first verb in a series.  It leads to some interesting questions of
part of speech analysis vs. subcategorization.

 

Herb

 

Herb,

 

My experience with serial verb constructions comes primarily from doing
some work on Khmer years ago, and since Khmer is isolating -- there are
some fossilized affixes, but nothing productive - establishing
dependency relations and finiteness in pairs of verbs can be difficult
(I tried using differential modification, but was never sure what the
results really meant). I'm thus using a far looser definition of 'serial
verb' than I should be ("a construction involving seriated verbs used as
if they're a single unit"). That said, I can't help but wonder whether a
(hypothetical) serial verb construction that develops from a previous
finite+dependent nonfinite pair might retain the morphological markings
of dependence on the second element without it actually being dependent
in terms of cognitive processing (and yes, that begs a giant question of
what "dependence" means in cognitive processing).

 

Now, immediately I want to object to my own point, based on its
empirical problems - I've just come up with a reason to rationalize away
any inconvenient counterevidence. It may be possible to get some support
for the idea from psycholinguistic research, though. At a very, very
informal level, I've noticed that when I ask beginning linguistics
students to "split" sentences into constituents, they readily split some
verb combinations but not others, and I can't help but wonder if their
behavior represents psychological reality (whatever that is) better than
some of our models do. 

 

Bill Spruiell

 

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University

 

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