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13th International Conference
on Functional Grammar
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| Serial verb constructions in Functional
Discourse Grammar |
Miriam van Staden,
Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Although serial verb
constructions were described for African languages even in the
nineteenth century (cf Christaller’s grammar of Twi
1875:69-73, 143-44), it was not until the nineteen eighties
that they began to rouse serious interest among linguists.
Serial verb constructions are special in the way in which two
lexical verbs occur in a single clause, sharing their argument
structure and clausal modifiers to different degrees, while
neither of these verbs would appear to be the ‘head’ in
the construction. And at least at first it appeared that these
constructions typically corresponded to straightforward
mono-clausal constructions in the language of the linguist (i.e.
German, English, Dutch).
In the most commonly described patterns, serial verb
constructions involve one verb that is from a restricted
semantic domain (i.e. expressions of ‘manner’, ‘direction’,
‘use of instrument’) where the other verb is ‘free’.
Yet we also find another pattern, most notably in Papuan
languages (van Staden and Reesink in press, van Staden and
Senft 2001, van Staden and Senft 2002). Here it is not so much
the case that one of the verbs is from a restricted semantic
domain, but the sequence of verbs, often more than two,
corresponds to a conceptual script or scenario. Restrictions
on co-occurrence are typically in the kinds of events that
follow each other in succession, e.g. a ‘state’, followed
by ‘movement towards a place’, etc. (cf. Pawley and Lane
1998).
The first type of serialisation gives descriptions of single
unitary events, while the latter are particularly interesting
as their description requires a higher order semantic category,
the episode.
Accounts of verb serialization typically focus on
analyses of he
morphosyntactic peculiarities of serial verb constructions as
“multi-predicate single clauses” in syntactic theory, the
most influential of which has been Foley & Van Valin’s
treatment in RRG. In this presentation I will outline how serial verb
constructions may be represented in Functional Discourse
Grammar, which like RRG uses layering but where the layers are
identified with different levels of analysis (Interpersonal,
Representational, Morphosyntactic). Following the proposal in (Smit and van Staden 2007)
which introduces a few modifications to the FDG
formalism outlined in (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2006),
I will review which layers in FDG may be joined in
serialisation and how this may be represented. In doing so I will show how the FDG distinction between a
Conceptual Level and a Representational Level, as well as the
recognition of a semantic category over and above the
‘event’ can help us refine this idea of unitary eventhood
in serialization.
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| References: |
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Hengeveld,
K. and Mackenzie, J. L. 2006. Functional Discourse Grammar.
In The encyclopedia
of language & linguistics K. Brown and A.H.
Anderson (eds.), 668-676. Oxford: Elsevier.
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Pawley,
Andrew; and Lane, Jonathan. 1998. From event sequence to
grammar: serial verb constructions in Kalam. In Case, Typology and Grammar Anna Siewierska and Song Jae Jung (eds.),
201-227. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Smit,
Niels; and van Staden, Miriam. 2007. Representational
Layering in Functional Discourse Grammar. Alfa
- Revista de Lingüística 51(2), 143-164.
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van
Staden, Miriam; and Senft, Gunter. 2001. Event Report and
Serial Verb Constructions in Austronesian and Papuan
Languages. Poster presented for the Fachbeirat at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.
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van
Staden, Miriam; and Senft, Gunter. 2002. Serial Verb
Constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages. Paper
presented at 9ICAL, Canberra.
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van
Staden, Miriam; and Reesink, Ger P. in press. Serial verb
constructions in a linguistic area. In Serial
Verb Constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages
Gunter Senft (ed.). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
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