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

 

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