Contrast With Compound Verbs
The term serial verb is usually distinguished from compound verb or complex predication:
- Serial verbs stack up several events (often but not always occurring sequentially), in a single clause. For example, Ewe trɔ dzo, (lit. turn leave), "turn and leave"; Hindi फ़ोन उठा-कर कहा fon uṭhā-kar kahā (lit. phone pick.up-CONJPART say.PAST), "...picked up the phone and said...". In Chinese and in languages of Southeast Asia the direct object of a transitive first verb is the subject of the second verb: lǎo.hǔ yǎo-sǐ le zhāng (lit. tiger bite-die PERF Zhang) "the tiger bit Zhang to death" where zhang is the direct object of yǎo (bite) and the subject of sǐ (die). In the homologous serial verb in Hindi the one who dies would be the tiger, not Zhang.
- Compound verb (also known as complex predicate): Here the first verb is the primary, and determines the primary semantics and also the argument structure. The second verb, often called a vector verb or explicator verb, provides fine distinctions, (usually in speaker attitude or aspect), and carries the inflection (tense / mood / agreement markers). Usually the main verb appears in conjunctive participle form (or, in Hindi and Punjabi, as a bare stem). For example, Hindi: सत्तू खा लिया sattū khā-liyā lit. parched.grain eat-TOOK, "ate up the sattu" (completive action) versus बच्चे.को खा-डाला bacce.ko khā-ḍālā lit. child eat-THREW, "devoured the child" (violent or unwanted action). In these examples, खा khā is the main or primary verb, and लिया liyā (TOOK) and डाला ḍālā (THREW) are the vector verbs.
The difference between serial verbs and compound verbs, then, is that the former use more than one verb to express more than one action while the latter use more than one verb to express a single action. Compound verbs are very common in northern Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi and Punjabi. They are less common in other Indo-Aryan languages and are also found in Dravidian, Turkic, Korean and Japanese, some Tibeto-Burman languages, some Northeast Caucasian languages, and in Quichua. Serial verbs are found in all of these languages and, in addition to them, are found in Chinese, Mon–Khmer, Tai–Kadai, Kwa, and in many pidgins and creoles. (See V.S. Naipaul's use of the Trinidadian serial verbs insure-and-burn, choke-'n'-rob, etc.)
Read more about this topic: Serial Verb Construction
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