Serial Verbs: Grammatical, Comparative and Cognitive Approaches

218 Pages·1991·18 MB·Studies in the Sciences of Language Series

by  Claire Lefebvre

SERIAL VERBS: GRAMMATICAL, COMPARATIVE AND
COGNITIVE APPROACHES
SSLS
STUDIES IN THE SCIENCES OF LANGUAGE SERIES
8
General Editor
Didier L. GOYVAERTS
Volume 8
Claire Lefebvre (ed.)
Serial Verbs:
Grammatical, Comparative and Cognitive Approaches
SERIAL VERBS:
GRAMMATICAL,
COMPARATIVE AND
COGNITIVE APPROACHES
Edited by
CLAIRE LEFEBVRE
Université du Québec à Montréal
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
Amsterdam/Philadelphia
1991
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Serial verbs : grammatical, comparative, and cognitive approaches / edited by Claire
Lefeb vre.
p. cm. -- (Studies in the sciences of language series, ISBN 90 6439 212 9; v. 8)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general ~ Verb. I. Lefebvre, Claire. II. Series.
P281.S47 1991
415 -- dc20 91-7128
ISBN 90 272 2324 6 (Eur.) / 1-55619-384-X (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1991 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
Table of contents
Preface vii
Misumalpan Verb Sequencing Constuctions
Ken Hale 1
Take Serial Verb Constructions in Fon
Claire Lefebvre 37
On the Relation of Serialization to Verb Extensions
Mark Baker 79
On Deriving Serial Verb Constructions
YafeiLi 103
Some Substantive Issues Concerning Verb Serialization:
Grammatical vs. Cognitive Packaging
T. Givón 137
Some Issues in Verb Serialization
Richard K. Larson 185

Preface
The papers in this volume offer several analyses of verb serialization written
within various theoretical frameworks: grammatical, comparative and
cognitive/functional. They cover a wide range of language families: Misumalpan
(Hale), Kwa (Lefebvre), Bantou (Baker), Chinese (Li) and Papuan New-Guinea
languages (Givón).
All the authors address two basic questions about verb serialization:
First, what is the structure and thematic constitution of the construction? The
answers to this question cover the spectrum of the options that are available in
current grammatical theory. Second, what aspect of the grammar differentiates
between languages which have serial constructions and those which do not?
Each of the specific proposals made by the authors are discussed by
R. Larson in the last paper in the volume. Larson opens new perspectives for
research on verb serialization by posing the following question: what analogues
for verb serialization can be found in the more familiar grammatical apparatus of
English? It is suggested that verb serialization finds a clear parallel in the
secondary predicate structures of English1.
The preparation of the manuscript was made possible by a grant from the
Institutional Funds for Research of the Université du Québec à Montréal.
Thanks to Monique Poulin who worked hard to format the manuscript.
Claire Lefebvre
Université du Québec à Montréal
1. An earlier version of each of these papers was presented at the Second Niger-Congo
Syntax and Semantics Workshop, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
April 11-12, 1988. The workshop was organized by Katherine Demuth and Victor
Manfredi, and sponsored by the M.I.T. Lexicon Project, the Harvard University
Committee of African Studies and the Boston University African Studies Center.

Misumalpan Verb Sequencing Constructions
Ken Hale
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
0 Introduction1
The surviving Misumalpan languages, Miskitu and Sumu, are spoken on
the Atlantic Coast of present-day Nicaragua and Honduras. Although it has not
been thoroughly established that Sumu and Miskitu are in fact genetically
related, the connection has been thought to be real for a century now (Brinton,
1891,1895). The term Misumalpan, which incorporporates syllables both from
the names of the extant members of the family and from the name of the now
extinct more westerly Matagalpa, was coined in the present century by
researchers who have accepted the classification (Mason, 1940; Johnson, 1940;
and for more extensive discussion, see Campbell, 1975,1979; Craig, 1985; and
Hale and Salamanca, 1987). It has also been proposed (Lehmann, 1920) that
Misumalpan is related to Chibchan, forming a part of the large Macro-Chibchan
phylum (cf. Constenla, 1985; Voegelin and Voegelin, 1965).
Whatever, the true relationship between Miskitu and Sumu proves
ultimately to be, they have been spoken together for a very long time, and
although cognate vocabulary is extremely sparse and difficult to establish, it is
clear that the contemporary languages share closely similar grammars. In
particular, they share the verb sequencing structures to which this brief report is
devoted. In this regard, the similarity between Miskitu and Sumu is so great that
the two can generally be illustrated jointly in the example sentences — as in (1)
below, in which the first line is Miskitu, and the second line is Ulwa, the
southern variety of Sumu:
2 KEN HALE
(1) Yang uûa  dim-i kauhw-ri.
Yang uu kau aaw-i wauhd-ikda.
I house in enter-PART fall-PAST.l
'I went into the house and fell down.'
'When I went into the house, I fell down.'
This sentence represents the type of verb sequencing sometimes called
"clause chaining" (cf., Longacre, 1985:263-269; Salamanca, 1988), an entirely
productive process which Misumalpan shares not only with other languages of
the Americas but also with the languages of New Guinea, where the device is in
fact notorious. Clause chaining is only one of at least three distinct, but
morphologically related, construction types found in Misumalpan, the others
being complementation and serialization. Each of the three types will be
discussed in turn.
I wish to caution the reader that this is primarily a descriptive discussion,
with informal theoretical remarks. It is not possible to give an in depth analysis
of Misumalpan verb sequencing as yet, given our incipient understanding of the
grammars of the languages of the group. In part our limitation here stems from
our imperfect knowledge of the sequencing phenomena themselves (imperfect
even at the observational level, often), but it also stems from the fact that a
proper understanding of verb sequencing requires detailed knowledge of other,
as yet poorly understood, grammatical processes of Misumalpan, such as
question formation, relativization, and negation, processes which are implicated
in any program for testing for the syntactic structure of serial and chaining
constructions, for example.
Despite these limitations, it seems to me worthwhile to present some of
the elementary facts of Misumalpan verb sequencing, as an initial gesture in
bringing these important Central American languages into the discussion of this
aspect of grammar.
1 Misumalpan clause chaining
Longacre (1985:264-265) has identified the following properties as
characteristic of clause chaining generally:
(a) There is a clause (characteristically final in a chain of clauses) that has a
verb of distinctive structure that occurs but once in the entire chain while
other (typically non final clauses have verbs of different structure...).