ABSTRACT
In a variety of world languages, notions that would elsewhere be expressed through conjunction, complementation, or secondary predication are rendered uniformly by means of a sequence of verbs or verb phrases. This phenomenon of verb serialization is illustrated by the sentences in (1–3), drawn from languages of West Africa: https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203429204/f1b479a4-8b04-46ce-b73e-8e9a679de9f0/content/fig0478_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203429204/f1b479a4-8b04-46ce-b73e-8e9a679de9f0/content/fig0479_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> The papers in Lefebvre (1991) offer insights into verb serialization from a variety of different perspectives—grammatical, comparative, and cognitive/functional. In attempting to provide some orientation for this work and for the general phenomenon, I will arrange my remarks around two questions: first, what is the basic character of the serial verb construction—what is its structure and thematic constitution? As we will see, the papers in Lefebvre (1991) largely cover the spectrum of possibilities available under current grammatical theory. Second, what analogues for verb serialization can be found in the more familiar grammatical apparatus of English? Developing some ideas by the major contributors, I suggest that verb serialization finds a clear echo in the secondary predicate structures of English, and that the difference between English and a language like Yoruba lies in the fact that secondary predicates are fundamentally nominal in the former but verbal in the latter.
