Bill,
On "gotta," informally, and especially in children, you can hear "Do I gotta?" with a little bit of a whine to it.
These aren't very serial verb like. In the West African instantiation, serial verbs constructions typically have a single subject, a single auxiliary, but multiple intransitive and transitive verbs. In the usual cases, verbs are used to mark valence, that is, they're used like case markers and prepositions in languages like German and English. Where we would typically have one verb with multiple arguments, as in
My brother brought me home a book for my child
where "me" is benefactive, "home" is locative, "a book" is object, and "my daughter" is dative, Yoruba, spoken by about 20 million people in Nigeria and Benin, would have
(without some important vowel and tone diacritics thanks to ASCII)
egbon mi ba mi mu iwe wa si ile fun omo mi
elder-sibling my help me pick-up-light-object book come to house give child my
(I fear email will mess up spacing on this. Treat anything hyphenated as a single gloss for a single word.) Ba, mu, wa, si, and fun are all verbs, each of which has independent lexical functions as verbs by themselves. There is some debate as to whether Yoruba has prepositions at all, and I tend to think it doesn't although there are two words that may be shifting in that direction. Si "to" is clearly a verb here even though it glosses as "in."
I could put a negative "ko" before "ba" and get "didn't" or "a" before "ba" and get "will" or "ti" before "ba" and get perfect aspect, or even combinations of these and other auxiliaries.
Serial verbs can also be used for multi-event sentences, like
I went to the market, bought meat, brought it home, cooked it, and ate it.
Mo lo si igboro ra eran mu wa si ile se jeun.
I go to market buy meat pick-up-light-object come to house cook eat.
This sentence too allows negatives and auxiliaries only before the first verb, "lo."
The language does have dependency marking on verbs, so "I want to go" would have a lengthening of the verb for want with a high tone on the vowel:
Mo fe e lo
I want to go
which serves as something like an infinitive marker in the language.
Yoruba does not have sentence coordination of the sort English has, using a word that can conjoin things of the same category, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. It does have a particle that goes in the auxiliary that means something like "and then," but there's no actual "and" for verbs, verb phrases, or clauses.
What distinguishes serial verb constructions from complement structures is that serial verbs have no morphological marking to show their relationship. Order is important, but no morphological marking like for the "want to" construction.
Just as an aside, in Yoruba, a verb can only be a consonant, a vowel, and a tone, with a few narrowly defined classes of exception. With 18 consonants, 10 vowels, 3 tones, and some phonotactic constraints, the total mathematically possible set of verbs comes to 510. Of these, only about 335 actually occur. Yoruba uses serial verb collocations, like
Fi enikan si ile
Take someone to ground (different final vowel and tone than "ile" "house")
Which means "divorce someone" to express a very flexible range of meanings. "Fi si ile" can also mean simply "put it down."
And some serial verbs are used adverbially:
Mo ti se ise tan
I perfect do work complete
I've finished the work.
There are, of course, variations on these structures in other languages, and additional constructions that don't occur in Yoruba, but this covers the bulk of serial verb constructions of the West African and Atlantic creole varieties. Serial verbs are also found in east and southeast Asia and New Guinea (the island), but many of these languages are almost purely analytic, with virtually no inflectional or derivational morphology, so they have somewhat different properties.
Perhaps something like "come give me a hug" would be like a serial verb construction, but there aren't many other structures in English that would correspond to serial verbs.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: 2009-02-23 18:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: he was run over/he got run over
Dear All:
I've been fiddling with these constructions, and have now become firmly
ambivalent about what to call parts of them. The test I usually use for
"full auxiliary status" is checking to see if the helping verb can show
up in front of the subject in a question. "Get" in the get-passive can't
do that, and neither can "got to" in its quasimodal use -- but the
quasipassive 'get' isn't the same as 'get to,' and I don't want to call
it a quasimodal.
Also, you can't get a do-form showing up for deontic "got to" (*Does he
gotta go?), although you can with the otherwise-similar-seeming "have
to" (Does he hafta go?). They *are* possible with the get-passive (Did
he get run over?), which implies that 'get' should be treated as the
main verb. Do-forms are also possible with the "get to" that implies
permission (Does he get to go?" but I'd think that's just evidence that
the second is more generally "Get X" with X as an infinitive.
Herb -- how serial verb-ish are these? I know English isn't officially
supposed to have those but from my very limited, and dated, knowledge of
Cambodian, the pattern certainly seems familiar. I seem to remember
you've mentioned SVCs, but apologies if I've switched the context on it.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Myers, Marshall
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 4:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: he was run over/he got run over
Dave,
I was the one suggesting that the construction may be a "get" passive.
Like a garden variety passive, the actor in the sentence is either
hidden or could be in a "by-phrase." "He got run over (by a truck.)"
When the object of the "by-phrase" becomes the subject of the converted
sentence, like the "to be" form in the garden variety passive, the
converted sentence drops the auxiliary: Joe was run over by a truck"
becomes "The truck ran over Joe." And "He got run over by a truck"
becomes "The truck ran over him." Notice also that in both cases of the
conversion of both types of passives, the verb then is marked for tense
(obviously, it has to be).
I'm not suggesting any generalizations beyond these, but, as I
understand it, the "get passive" does bear some credence in some
grammarians' minds.
In other situations, I can understand why "get" can act like an
auxiliary.
Marshall
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Kehe
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 1:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: he was run over/he got run over
Scott,
I agree with Janet calling "got" a helping verb. I tell my students
that passive voice consists of an auxiliary verb and past participle.
I'd be interested to know why you and Patty would consider "got" a
model.
Dave
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Patricia
Lafayllve
Sent: Fri 2/20/2009 8:58 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: he was run over/he got run over
Scott-
I can see the "logic" of calling it a passive with "got" as the modal,
but I'd probably let the student know that the construction was
"informal" and make sure they know how to construct a passive using
"formal" methods (ie "was run over"). Does that make sense? I am
posting while jet-lagged, here...
-patty
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Woods
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 10:33 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: he was run over/he got run over
List,
My previous message on this topic delivered itself before I had finished
it. Here is the complete message.
Recently, a student wrote "he got run over." This seems to be a common
way of expressing the passive.
Would you characterize this as a passive? Would you analyze "run" as
the verb of the sentence and "got" as a modal operating like "was" in a
normally constructed (was run over) passive?
Scott Woods
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