Re: THEORY: Cross-Referencing the Arguments of Consecutive Verbs, And Similar Things

On 6/30/05, Tom Chappell <tomhchappell@...> wrote:
> 
> Hello, anyone who feels like answering.
> Occasionally two different clauses share some of their arguments.
> Some languages have a way of indicating this, and take advantage of it.
> [MOTIVATING EXAMPLES]
> [SERIAL VERBS]
> For example, in serial-verb languages, if a series of verbs have all of 
> the same arguments in all of the same grammatical roles and relations, the 
> sentence may consist of a complete clause followed by the rest of the verbs 
> in sequence.
> In such cases, there is no need to inflect any verb but either the first 
> verb or the last verb for the person, number, or gender of its core 
> arguments -- on the other verbs it is necessary only to mark either that it 
> has exactly the same arguments as the verb before it, or that it has exactly 
> the same arguments as the verb after it.
> Frequently, also, either only the first or only the last verb of the 
> sequence is fully inflected for tense, mood, and aspect.
> 
I think you can also find serial verbs in an ergative pattern in, hmm, 
Oceanic I think. In which the second verb's subject is the first's object. I 
can try to find a reference, if you wish. I don't know whether these can be 
chained.

You get subsequent stative verbs used as adverbs in Kwaio and related 
tongues, I believe. I don't know if it can be reconstructed for 
Proto-Oceanic but it's a not uncommon pattern in its descendents.

[WA-CONSECUTIVES]
> There are also languages, such as, if I remember what I was told, 
> Classical Hebrew and Medieval Welsh, which have, in narrative, a 
> "consecutive" device as follows. A sentence is written, and then, as long as 
> the subject and the tense stays the same and no negative is encountered, a 
> series of verb-phrases is piled on with "ands"; these are written by means 
> of de-verbal nouns (gerunds or infinitives or supines) in Welsh, iirc.
> 
The pattern in Mayan languages, at least in certain discourse genres, tends 
to be that once a noun phrase is presented as the topic, it's the understood 
subject until another topic is introduced. There's a strong discourse rule 
that avoids full transitive sentences -- ones with a full S and a full O. 
(This is quite common, of course, in speech across languages, but it's much 
stronger in Mayan than any other language group I've seen.) So you get a big 
chain of VS VO VO VO VS VO etc. sentences, with the subject expressed in 
verb agreement. (The verb agreement is often rather ambiguous -- in a story, 
for example, everything'll be 3rd person anyway -- so it's more like the 
above pattern than it at first seems.)

So you get "Existed JPeedroj-TOP. He-went to Flores. He-saw JJwan-TOP. 
He-said etc...", where the "he/she/it" marker in sentences 2 and 3 mean 
JPeedroj, and the one in 4 means JJwan. Okay, this story is stupid, but lots 
of short clauses like this is the model of Mayan eloquence, rather than the 
long sentences of English or Latin eloquence. And the more repetition, the 
better. (There's also the discourse pattern, not uncommon in American Indian 
languages, in which the listener repeats the last thing said, to indicate 
that they're listening and to urge the speaker to continue. It's like 
"uh-huh" and nodding.)

Different in execution, of course, but it feels similar to me.

Is it coincidental that all three are verb-initial? I recall reading that 
serial verbs aren't really found outside the SVO world, but I can't think of 
a reason why this would be. (For example, some SVO Mon-Khmer languages 
developed it, and the non-SVO ones didn't.)

-- 
Patrick Littell
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