Verb serialization and object position

✍ Scribed by VEENSTRA, TONJES

• Book ID: 111935909
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 147 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0024-3949
• DOI: 10.1515/ling.2000.014

✦ Synopsis

This paper discusses the phrase-structure configuration of resultative serialverb constructions and the position of the object in these constructions. It is argued that the analysis involves a VP-shell configuration in which the second VP is an adjunct to the first VP (cf. Larson 1991). As such, serialverb constructions are instances of ''pseudo-complementation,'' as defined in Seuren (1991). The object is part of the first predicate, and the argumentsharing effect is obtained through operator movement inside the second predicate. The evidence is based on a careful examination of sandhi phenomena, case-licensing mechanisms, extraction patterns (argument as well as adjunct), placement of ideophones, and the (un)availability of parasitic gaps. If serial-verb constructions do reduce to secondary-predication constructions, then the study of verb serialization can shed some new light on an old controversy of linguistic theory, namely the syntactic structure of secondary predication. It is argued that the analysis proposed in this paper can be extended to secondary-predication constructions in nonserializing languages.