ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, I reviewed some of the problems that are related to having a concise definition of SVCs. In particular, I observed that the SVC phenomenon appears to be unconstrained under those analyses that identify SVC types simply on the basis of intuitions about what the combination of verbs express (Oyelaran 1982). The other side of this problem is that some analyses recognize types/classes of SVCs but give a unified syntactic analysis anyway (Baker 1989, Collins 1997 ). These kinds of classifications and the analyses that underlie them fail in some respects to capture cross-linguistic empirical generalizations. In particular, inconsistent SVC typology clouds serious comparative analysis. For example, how do we explain why resultative SVCs consistently show up as resultative V-V compounds in Igbo and Chinese?
