Are There Serial Verb Constructions in Old English? A New Perspective on the Changes in Verbal Complementation

Abstract

This article discusses the existence of serial verb constructions in Old English and explores the complementation of aspectual and control verbs as well as other related constructions. The discussion of the Old English data finds remarkable differences with respect to the syntactic configurations of Present-Day English that are described as serial by Roberts (2010). Although the range of serial constructions is more restrictive in Old English, at least with aspectual verbs, the analysis of verbal complementation from the perspective of serialisation allows us to bring other convergent constructions to the discussion, including configurations with linked infinitives and participles in predicative constructions and configurations with pre-modals and the causative verb dōn ‘to do’.