Serial Verb Constructions

Abstract The present article aims to give a survey of the typology of serial verb constructions (SVCs) and the criteria that are needed for defining them. For that purpose, it starts with a detailed account of Aikhenvald and Dixon (2006) and their comprehensive cross‐linguistic account of SVCs. In a critical discussion of this approach, this article will then address the following three issues. (i) The concept of single eventhood is a more general concept from which a number of Aikhenvald and Dixon's (2006) criteria can be iconically derived. The macro‐event property and time‐positional operators ( Bohnemeyer et al. 2007 ) provide a good basis for a more coherent definition of what makes an event as far as events are independent of cultural factors. (ii) Some languages like Kalam also use the morphosyntactic expression format of serialization for discourse purposes. Because the narrative use of that construction clearly violates single eventhood, it should not be discussed as an instance of SVC. (iii) Historically, the unmarked juxtaposition of verbs can induce processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization. This article ends with the question of how far the label of ‘serial verb construction’ actually refers to a cross‐linguistically coherent phenomenon.