University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Serial Verb Constructions: a distributional and typological perspective

Ross, Daniel; Grunow, Ryan; Lac, Kelsey; Jabbour, George; Dempsey, Jack

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/88844

Description

Title
Serial Verb Constructions: a distributional and typological perspective
Author(s)
  • Ross, Daniel
  • Grunow, Ryan
  • Lac, Kelsey
  • Jabbour, George
  • Dempsey, Jack
Issue Date
2015-04-17
Keyword(s)
  • Serial verb constructions
  • Linguistics
  • Morphosyntax
  • Typology
Abstract
Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) are a frequently discussed but poorly defined syntactic feature of many languages around the world. We present the first broad distributional study of SVCs, using the methodology from The World Atlas of Language Structures. We establish a standard definition of SVCs from trends in the literature and look through descriptive grammars for 325 languages to determine the distribution of SVCs, identifying instances in about 40% of the world’s languages, while also looking at similar constructions that vary from this definition. We also test proposed typological correlations for SVCs against a large dataset for the first time.
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/88844
Copyright and License Information
Copyright © Ross et al. 2015

Owning Collections

Illinois Research and Scholarship (Open Collection) PRIMARY
This is the default collection for all research and scholarship developed by faculty, staff, or students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign