Grammaticalization in serial verb constructions
Tariana has productive verb serialization (Aikhenvald 1999c). These serial verb constructions (SVC) are known to include up to seven verbs. They are strictly contiguous (i.e. no other constituent can intervene between their components). Each component of a SVC is an independent phonological word, and they all receive the same inflection for person, number and gender of A/SA. All the components of a SVC have the same tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality and polarity value. The order of the components may be fixed or not depending on the construction type. A SVC cannot consist of only stative verbs.
All enclitics tend to appear only once in a SVC, usually on the last component, with the exception of Aktionsart markers, referring to a SVC as a whole. The Aktionsart enclitics specify only the action of the component they occur on. See §4.1.
Serial verb constructions are of three types (cf. Durie 1997; Crowley 1987).
(1) Asymmetrical constructions consist of at least one verb from a closed class —a motion verb, a posture verb, a modal verb, or a verb of causation, and the other verb from an open class. An example of a directional SVC, with a motion verb, is shown in (2).
(2) symmetrical constructions consist of several verbs from open classes. They refer to a sequence of events (often including cause-effect and goal-benefactive).
(3) ambient constructions are those in which one verb is used to ‘modify’ the other. The ‘modifier’ verb is often stative (see Aikhenvald 1999c).
The three construction types differ in their argument sharing, constituent order, and, particularly, in how grammaticalization works. Symmetrical constructions undergo lexicalization and become idiomatic; the meaning of the whole cannot always be recovered from the meaning of the parts — see Durie (1997).6 Asymmetrical and ambient SVCs tend to get grammaticalized.
Their grammaticalization takes the following paths. Path (a) does not involve a change in word class, while (b) and (c) do. (a) A change from a full verb (albeit from a closed subclass) to an auxiliary in asymmetrical SVCs of the aspectual and modal types.
This is illustrated in (3); further examples are given in §4.3.2. In (3) the posture verb ‘stand’ becomes a durative marker in an asymmetrical SVC.
Other verbs of motion and posture tend to grammaticalize this way in serial verb constructions; thus, ‘go’ becomes an imperfective marker, and ‘sit’ denotes habitual. The verb ‘make, do’ gets grammaticalized as a marker of causation.
Similar processes of grammaticalization in asymmetrical SVCs are attested in numerous other parts of the world (see Bisang 1996, for East and Mainland South-East Asian languages; Dixon 1980:430–1, for Australian languages; Emanatian 1992; Durie 1997). (b) A shift from a verb (albeit from a closed subclass) to a minor closed class (postpositions) in asymmetrical SVCs of directional type.
An example of this is-nukuitaka in (4). It is a fossilized form of-nuku ‘go down’. That it is a postposition and not a verbal form is shown by the fact that it takes the nominal possessive marker i- ‘indefinite person’, which is almost never used with verbs. Note that motion verbs have to be transitivized to become subject to this grammaticalization (cf. the form-yeneta in (47) in §4.3.2).
This path of grammaticalization has been documented by Lord (1993) and Durie (1988).
(c) A shift from major open class (verbs) to semi-open class (adverbs) in ambient SVCs. The SO verb khida ‘be ready’ can be used as an adverb, ‘ready, finished, over’, as shown in (5).
All these grammaticalization paths agree with the principle of directionality of category change involving serial verbs postulated by Lord (1993:245), namely from major to minor category — (b) and (c) above — or from a full verb to an auxiliary, as in (a) above. They also conform to the unidirectionality of grammaticalization (increase in abstractness, development of grammatical meanings out of lexical meanings, and increase in ‘bondedness’ — Traugott and Heine 1991:4–5). They involve change in meaning, but no phonological reduction (unlike the aspect and Aktionsart markers discussed in §4, grammaticalized components of serial verbs do not lose their primary stress) — contrary to the Parallel Reduction Hypothesis which suggests that ‘form and meaning covary’ in grammaticalization (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994:19–21; see §4.4).
