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 difficult 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.
It 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:
In Santali, apart from serial compound verbs, a rare serial verb construction denotes distinct sub-events/quasi-synonymous events of the same situation and also serializes TAM/person in the syntagmas, where the pronominal object markers appear twice, but the indicative marker occurs only once in the final verb.
Examples with intervening elements between verbs
In some languages that have verb serialization, the verbs must appear consecutively, with nothing intervening. In other languages, however, it is possible for arguments, normally the object of one of the verbs, to come in between the serialized verbs. The resulting construction is a sequence of verb phrases, rather than of plain verbs. The following example is from Yoruba, from Nigeria: