Serial verb ʔaw ‘take’ with instrumental meaning in Isaan: A distinct construction?

Abstract

This paper describes the syntactic and semantic properties of serial verb clauses with ʔaw ‘take’ in Isaan, a Tai-Kadai language variety spoken in Northeast Thailand that shares linguistic features with both Thai and Lao. Contrary to previous hypotheses about the instrumental meaning of ‘take’ in Thai and Lao, I argue that the instrumental meaning of ʔaw belongs to a distinct serial verb construction (SVC) in Isaan grammar, and the pattern ʔaw NP VP does not qualify as an instance of the “purposive” SVC nor the “handling-dispatch” SVC. The analysis has used a combination of semantic tests, analysis of corpus frequency patterns, and discourse analysis. Analysis of the Spoken Isaan Corpus suggests that serial verb uses of ʔaw with instrumental meaning not only have a syntactic pattern distinguishable from the purposive and the handling-dispatch constructions, but also exhibit different discourse-informational structure; the instrument participant is typically new information or contextually non-recoverable information.