This work examines both historical and comparative evidence in documenting the sweep of diachronic change in the context of serial verb constructions. Using a wide range of data from languages of West Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, it demonstrates how shifts in meaning and usage result in syntactic, morphological and lexical change. The process by which verbs lose lexical semantic content and develop case-marking functions is described; it is argued that the change is directional, from verb to preposition (or postposition) to affix, along a grammaticalization continuum. This same grammaticalization process is shown to result in the development of complementizers, adverbial subordinators, conjunctions, adverbs and auxiliaries from verbs. Strong parallels across languages are found in the meanings of the verbs that become “defective” and in the functions they come to mark. The changes are documented in detail, with examples from a number of languages illustrating the effect of the changes on typology and word order, implications for the encoding of definiteness and aspect, and the relevance of notions such as discourse topic, foreground and transitivity. With respect to theoretical assumptions and terminology, the author has taken a relatively nonpartisan approach, and the discussion is accessible to students of language as well as of interest to theoreticians.

Terry Crowley introduces the idea of serial verbs which are clauses that include multiple verbs or verb-like items that are used to convey a single meaning like wash the plates clean. The author argues that their formation is a consequence of contact between different languages.

A serial verb construction is a sequence of verbs which acts together as one. This oustanding book is the first to study the phenomenon across languages of different typological and genetic profiles. The authors, all experienced linguistic fieldworkers, follow a unified typological approach and avoid formalisms.

The papers in this volume offer several analyses of verb serialization written within various theoretical frameworks: grammatical, comparative and cognitive/functional. They cover a wide range of language families. All authors address two basic questions about verb serialization: First, what is the structure and thematic constitution of the construction? The answers to this question cover the spectrum of the options that are available in current grammatical theory. Second, what aspect of the grammar differentiates between languages which have serial constructions and those which do not? The specific proposals made by the authors are discussed by R. Larson in the concluding paper. Larson opens new perspectives for research on verb serialization by posing the following question: what analogues for verb serialization can be found in the more familiar grammatical apparatus of English? It is suggested that verb serialization finds a clear parallel in the secondary predicate structures of English.

A serial verb construction is a sequence of verbs which acts together as one. The authors examine form and function of serial verbs and also explore the phenomenon across languages of different typological and genetic profiles.

In Serial Verbs in White Hmong Nerida Jarkey investigates verb serialization, a highly productive grammatical strategy in this dynamic Southeast Asian language in which multiple verbs are simply concatenated within a single clause to depict a single event. The investigation identifies four major types of serial verb construction (SVC) in White Hmong and finds that the key function of all these types is to depict a single event in an elaborate and vivid way, a much-favoured method of description in this language. These findings concerning the nature and function of SVCs in White Hmong contribute to broader discussions on the nature of events as both cognitive and cultural constructs.

This book surveys multi-verb constructions in multiple languages from the Americas, showing a very rich tapestry of typologically unusual constructions, including serial verbs, auxiliaries, co-verbs, phasal verbs. Where possible, a diachronic perspectrive is offered.