Distribution of serial verb types

bradrn · Post by **bradrn** » Sat Sep 12, 2020 5:07 am

van Staden and Reesink (2008) distinguish three main types of serial verb construction (SVC) with respect to morphological marking:

In independent serialisation, each verb is marked separately for inflectional morphology. Each verb may take different arguments, and the verbs need not be contiguous. Most often each verb has the same morphological marking, but it is also possible for each to have different marking.
In dependent serialisation, inflectional morphology is marked only on one verb in the construction; the other verbs are uninflected or have greatly reduced morphology. Again, each verb may take different arguments, and the verbs need not be contiguous; however each verb necessarily has the same marking.
In complex serialisation, verbs are placed strictly next to each other overriding every other rule. This means that such an SVC effectively becomes a verbal compound: prefixes are applied to the first verb and suffixes are applied to the last verb, and the SVC as a whole will act as if it were a single verb. Naturally, complex SVCs must be contiguous, and will share the same marking.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed about this typology is the amount of variance between languages and language areas with respect to the diversity of SVC types. For instance, the languages of East Nusantra (van Staden and Reesink again) tend to have multiple types of SVC, with most languages having two of the above types. By contrast, many other Papuan languages have only one type of serialisation, most commonly dependent (as seen in many TNG languages) but occasionally independent (e.g. Skou). Other areas seem less uniform; for instance, East Ambae has both independent and complex serialisation, while the closely related language Mwotlap has only complex serialisation.

Due to this diversity, I would be interested to know if any typological studies have been done to investigate the distribution of these different types of SVCs. The closest I know of is the aforementioned paper by van Staden and Reesink; however this paper only covers 12 languages, all from the same area (East Nusantra). If such a paper exists, I would find this sort of broader overview useful to assess the distribution of these various types of SVC (e.g. I’d quite like to know how common it is for languages to have only one type vs many types of serialisation).