Serial verb constructions (SVCs) are a somewhat vexed topic. Too many good linguists have wasted too much ink trying to pinpoint exactly what is and isn’t an SVC. Whatever they might be, Proto-‘Savanna’ certainly has a lot of them. For these reasons, this post will focus on trying to give some overview notes on the more common types of SVCs in Proto-‘Savanna’, rather than trying to write a full and complete listing of the status of every possible SVC in the language.
I will adopt a working definition of SVC as ‘any construction involving two verbs in the same clause, in which there is no intonational break and each verb shares at least one argument with another’. This is a very non-rigorous definition, and is also quite wide: it includes quite a lot of things which other linguists disqualify from SVC-hood. In fact, the recent literature tends to refer to this category using another term entirely, as ‘multi-verb constructions’, rather than the narrower subset of ‘serial verb constructions’. Nonetheless, I will continue to call them SVCs because that seems to be the more usual term amongst conlangers, and also because quite a lot of them are, in fact, SVCs.
Firstly: what is not an SVC? Obviously, two independent clauses are not an SVC. This becomes less obvious when the subjects are coreferential, since in this situation the subject of the second clause can be elided:
- Be
- 1s
- walhali
- go.IMPF-CONT
- tsagif,
- running,
- lhiisi
- perceive.PFV
- di
- can
- meŋul
- eye
- kasip
- star
- tlii.
- INDEF.PL
As I ran, [I] could see stars.
In this case, the difference in inflectional aspect between the verbs is a giveaway — SVCs in Proto-‘Savanna’ always have their verbs agreeing in inflectional aspect. The other obvious giveaway is the comma between the clauses: this has an intonational break, so cannot be an SVC.
More puzzling is the case of complementation, which is usually unmarked: e.g. be siwe tsisa qi walha, lit. ‘1s have desire 3s go’ = ‘I want him/her to go’. Is this an SVC or not? It certainly looks like one — but on the other hand it just as easily could be biclausal, in support of which the inner verb can freely change in aspect. Even more puzzling is the case where the inner subject can be deleted, to give e.g. be siwe tsisa walha ‘I want to go’, a construction which looks even more SVC-like. At some point we are forced to conclude that ‘is this an SVC or not’ is not, in general, a revealing question.
Now, onto the actual SVCs. These are a rather heterogenous group, and can be classified along several axes, the most important of which are probably:
- Symmetry: Are all verbal slots unrestricted, or are some verbs drawn from a smaller subset in an asymmetric fashion?
- Contiguity: Are the verbs necessarily placed immediately next to each other, or may other material (e.g. objects) intervene?
- Argument sharing: Which arguments are shared, between which verbs?
Perhaps the most common SVCs are motional SVCs, which have the following summary structure:
| Starting point | Direction | Manner | Path | Destination |
| fas ‘stand’ + noun | walha ‘go’, yusaa ‘come’ | coverb or ideophone, e.g. naŋa ‘walk’, tsagif ‘running’ | verb, e.g. qaathan ‘fall’, yagi ‘return’, qumum ‘go about randomly’ | noun, possibly preceded by walha ‘go’ |
All of these elements are optional, although some have dependencies on others (e.g. the manner words require a preceding directional verb). The motional SVC as a whole may further be followed by a main verb, to indicate how the subject travels to perform that action:
- Be
- 1s
- fasi
- stand.PFV
- sasay
- home
- thaŋ
- DEF.SG
- waalhi
- go.PFV
- tsagif
- running
- qaathan
- fall.PFV
- fawetli
- speak.PFV
- feqe.
- cry
I ran down away from home and cried.
Alternately, a motion verb can also be placed after the main verb. This construction is more restricted than that shown above, and at most one or two verbs are allowed. Semantically this can represent motion performed after the action, or some other form of associated motion done during the action: for instance, while walha fawetl feqe in the above example is ‘go cry’, fawetl feqe walha means something more like ‘go crying’. If the main verb has an object, often the motion applies to that, giving a switch-subject argument sharing pattern: e.g. be ŋandi ŋay yusaye, lit. ‘1s deform 3s come’ = ‘I pulled it towards me’. (Note that the pronoun cannot be reduced to its subject form here.) Sometimes the motion verb may be there purely to give a direction or path, rather than to express physical motion: e.g. lhiise meŋul qaathan is ‘look down’, rather than ‘look and fall’.
The two forms of motion SVC may of course be combined: walha fawetl feqe yagi, for instance, might mean ‘go and cry and come back’. The general principle here is that the verbs tend to be placed in iconic order, following the temporal order of events.
Aside from motional SVCs, there are also numerous constructions with applicative meaning, which add arguments. We have already seen one in passing: fas X, meaning ‘at X’. These are basically preposition-equivalents, performing a role very similar to that of prepositions in other languages. (Sinitic linguists tend to call these things ‘coverbs’, but we’re already using that word for something different.) A summary table (where X is an arbitrary noun and V is an arbitrary verb):
| Construction | Gloss | Semantics |
| fas X V / V fas X | stand X V / V stand X | V at X (locative) |
| siwe X V | have/take X V | V with X (instrumental) |
| tlaquf X V | accompany X V | V with X (comitative) |
| paatli X V | give X V | help X with V (benefactive) |
| V paatli X | V give X | V to X (dative) |
| wedeŋ X V | resemble X V | V like X (similative) |
The instrumental construction is particularly productive, and can also be put together with other verbs to give constructions with semantics of disposal or despatch. For instance, ‘give X to Y’ is expressed as siwe X paatli Y, lit. ‘take X give Y’. Motion verbs can also be used: ’bring X to Y’, for instance, is walha siwe X yusaa paatli Y, lit. ‘go take X come give Y’. Siwe is furthermore able to introduce objects, if they are reasonably concrete: thus a sentence like Be qisni qi ‘I cut it’ can be rewritten as Be siwe ŋay qisni ‘I took it and cut’.
Similar to the applicative SVCs are causative SVCs. These take the general form of X waq Y V (Z), lit. ‘X do Y V (Z)’ = ‘X makes Y V (Z)’. Other verbs with similar meaning may be substituted for waq here: for instance, Be ŋandi qi waalhi qitsim ‘I squeezed it through the hole’, where ŋandi means ‘deform’.
The above were all asymmetric SVCs. However, Proto-‘Savanna’ also has some symmetric SVCs, in which we cannot as easily identify one main verb and another modifying verb. In general, these come in two types: simultaneous SVCs, in which two adjacent verbs share a subject and represent events occurring at the same time, and resultative or cause-effect SVCs, in which the object of the first verb is the subject of the second verb, and in which the second verb gives a result of the first verb’s occurrence. These SVCs have a strong tendency to lexicalise into compound verbs with an idiomatic meaning; the dictionary contains numerous such examples. I will not go into any further detail about symmetric SVCs here — partly because Proto-‘Savanna’ uses asymmetric SVCs far more often, partly because in any case such SVCs are often listed individually in the dictionary, but mostly because I don’t want to bother figuring out their details just right now.
