The serial verb construction, also known as (verb) serialization or verb stacking, is a syntactic phenomenon in which two or more verbs or verb phrases are strung together in a single clause. It is a common feature of many African, Asian and New Guinean languages. Serial verb constructions are often described as coding a single event; they can also be used to indicate concurrent or causally-related events.
Uses
The terms "serial verbs", "serialization", etc. are used by different authors to denote somewhat different sets of constructions. There are also differences in how the constructions are analyzed, in terms of both syntax and semantics.
In general, a structure described as a serial verb construction will consist either of two (or possibly more) consecutive verbs or of two or more consecutive verb phrases in which each verb may have its own object and possibly other modifiers. There will usually be no marking, by means of affixes or subordinating conjunctions, that one verb is dependent on the other, and they will not be linked by coordinating conjunctions. Some linguists insist that serial verbs cannot be dependent on each other; however, if a language does not mark dependent verbs with affixation, it can be hard to determine whether any dependency relation exists when verbs appear in sequence.
Serial verbs normally denote actions that are closely connected and can be considered to be part of the same event. They may be actions taking place simultaneously, or one may represent the cause, purpose or result of the other. In most cases, the serial verbs in a sequence are understood to share the same subject.
Certain expressions resembling serial verb construction are found in English (surviving from Early Modern English), such as let's go eat and come live with me. In such constructions, the second verb would normally be regarded as a bare infinitive (and can generally be replaced by a "full" infinitive by the insertion of to before it).
Examples with consecutive verbs
The next sentence in Persian contains 19 consecutive verbs:
داشتم، میرفتم، دیدم، گرفته، نشسته، گفتم، بذار، بپرسم، ببینم، میآد، نمیآد، دیدم، میگه، نمیخوام، بیام، میخوام، برم، بگیرم، بخوابم!
which means, I was heading and I saw she/he is sitting, I thought to ask to see whether he would come or wouldn't come, I figure out "I don't want to come, and I want to go get some sleep" he said!
The following example of serialization comes from the Nupe language from Nigeria:
The two verbs bé and lá appear consecutively, with no linking word (like "and") or anything else to indicate that one verb is subordinate to the other. The subject, "Musa", is understood to apply to both verbs. In this example, the second verb also has a direct object. Note that in the English version given, the second verb is translated by an infinitive, "to take", which is marked as subordinate to the first verb.
Depending on the language, the shared subject may be marked on both verbs or only one. In most of the examples, it is marked only once. However, in the following example from the Baré, in the Upper Amazon, the first person singular subject ("I") is marked twice:
A similar construction is also found in most varieties of dialectal Arabic. The following example is from Lebanese Arabic:
As a rule, serial verbs cannot be marked independently for categories such as tense, aspect and mood. Either all of the verbs are marked for the same features, or a sole marker is shared by all of them. In the Hindi (literally, phone pick-up say (PAST)), "picked up the phone and said", only the second verb is marked as past tense, but both are understood to refer to the past. In the following example, from the West African Ewe, both verbs appear in their perfective form:
In Japanese, two verbs may come together with the first verb in the continuative form (), as in ("push through"), in which oshi is the continuative form of osu ("push"), and tōru ("get through") is a finite form whose present tense and indicative mood are understood to apply to oshi. Similarly, ("jump in") in which tobi is from tobu ("jump"), and komu means "go in"; ("be completed"), where deki is from dekiru ("be able to be done") and agaru means "rise, be offered". No arguments can come between the two verbs in this construction (in contrast to those described in the following section).
In the case of negation, only one negator can be applied to the whole serial construction, as in the following Baré example: