Serial verbs by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (review)

1. INTRODUCTION.¹

Serial verbs are commonly known as a sequence of several verbs forming one clause and being conceptualized as a single event, without any overt marker between the verbs. The monograph under review, Serial verbs (Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory), by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is a comprehensive typological investigation of the phenomenon of verb serialization in the languages of the world, based on the author's firsthand fieldwork and the investigation of 800 grammars, as stated on page 14. Working with large databases is a feature of the author's work. The analysis is cast within the functionalist framework of basic linguistic theory; however, analyses of serial verb constructions (SVCs) cast within other frameworks, such as the generative approach, are also taken into account. There can be little doubt that the monograph marks a major progress in the studies of serial verbs, both in terms of characteristics for recognizing serial verbs and in terms of a wide array of discussion about it. The monograph is the first high profile one on this topic, but its systematicity and scope would benefit any topic. The essence of a typological study is to offer new analytic choices and concepts for linguists to analyze and write grammars of unknown or understudied languages. This monograph achieves the purpose by offering linguists a comprehensive analytic framework and showing them the diverse patterns in SVCs. Section 2 is devoted to a brief summary of the contents. Section 3 mentions how the monograph fits into the field of the studies of serial verbs. Critical evaluation is provided in section 4. Section 5 addresses significance of the monograph.

2. BRIED SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

The book consists of nine chapters, a fieldworker's guide, references, and three indexes. Chapter 1 sets the scene by presenting and exemplifying a number of typological key features of SVCs, offering a continuum-style definition of the phenomenon. Special focus has been paid to chapter 2 by examining definitional properties of serial verbs, including their monoclausality, prosodic features of a monoverbal clause, shared tense, aspect, evidentiality, mood, modality, and polarity value, and shared illocutionary force. Chapter 3 shows that in asymmetrical verbs, the minor component has the tendency of becoming grammaticalized into an exponent of aspect or modality, a directional, an adposition, a conjunction or a complementizer, and comparative and superlative markers. In contrast, symmetrical verbs have a tendency to undergo lexicalization. As a consequence, they may become semantically non-compositional, creating lexical idioms. Further features of SVCs are dealt with in chapter 4, including contiguity of components, wordhood of components, and the interactions between the two parameters. Chapter 5 discusses the instances of limited serialization and offers a comparison between serial verbs and superficially similar constructions. Aikhenvald formulates three crosslinguistic tendencies for languages with more than one type of SVCs in chapter 6: "(a) the closer verb roots are in surface structure, the more they tend to undergo grammaticalization or lexicalization of some sort; (b) one-word SVCs tend to be restricted to a more limited set of verb roots than multi-word serial verbs; (c) if a language has two types of serial verbs, at least one of them will be contiguous" (pp. 155–6). Chapter 7 addresses the uses and the functions of SVCs, and chapter 8 manages to explore the paths of historical development in SVC, their fate in language contact, and the ways in which they are acquired by children. Chapter 9 concludes the book, with all the key issues of previous chapters being summarized.

3. BOOK SET IN CONTEXT

This monograph well fits into the state of the field of serial verb studies. Serial verbs have been recognized as a salient characteristic of western African, Creole, Southeast Asian, Oceanic, New Guinean, and Amazonian languages. Some aspects of serial verbs have long been the focus of linguistic analysis, including grammatical phenomena, cognitive representation of event structure, and implications for typological comparison. Previous studies of SVCs have focused on single languages, language groups, or restricted...