[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
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
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