Abstract
In serial verb constructions (SVCs), multiple independent lexical verbs are combined in a mono-clausal construction. SVCs express a range of grammatical meanings and are attested in numerous spoken languages all around the world. Yet, to date only few studies have investigated the existence and functions of SVCs in sign languages. For the most part, these studies—including a previous study on Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT)—relied on elicited data. In this article, we offer a cross-modal typological contribution to the study of SVCs by investigating the phenomenon based on naturalistic corpus data from NGT. A search of the Corpus NGT yielded 41 mono-clausal utterances in which one of a closed set of verbs—namely go, give, take, and call—combines with another lexical verb. While the combinations we found are in important respects reminiscent of SVCs described for spoken languages, our data also confirm the previous finding that the fixed verb in the SVC serves to express agreement (by means of spatial modulation) when the other verb cannot do so. In addition, we identified some novel uses of the verbs go and give: (i) go functioning as a future tense marker and (ii) give functioning as a light verb. We will also discuss aspects of the grammaticalization of SVCs in NGT: from lexical verb to light verb to auxiliary, again offering some comparison to grammaticalization paths described for spoken languages.
Highlights
Verbs and verbal inflection in sign languages have received considerable attention since the early days of sign language linguistics (Fischer and Gough, 1978; Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Padden, 1983), and their properties and appropriate characterization are still under scrutiny in recent studies (Meir, 2002; Lillo-Martin and Meier, 2011; Wilbur, 2013; Schembri et al, 2016)
For the sake of cross-linguistic comparison, we provide here an example from Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) that is similar to the NGT example (11b)
As one of our goals is to offer some speculations about possible grammaticalization, we decided to create a third category “grammaticalization.” To this newly established category, we transferred: (i) ten examples involving GO in which it behaves like a future marker; (ii) eight examples with GIVE which are reminiscent of a light verb construction, that is, instances in which GIVE combines with a noun or adjective and does not fully predicate semantically
Summary
Verbs and verbal inflection in sign languages have received considerable attention since the early days of sign language linguistics (Fischer and Gough, 1978; Klima and Bellugi, 1979; Padden, 1983), and their properties and appropriate characterization are still under scrutiny in recent studies (Meir, 2002; Lillo-Martin and Meier, 2011; Wilbur, 2013; Schembri et al, 2016). One of the issues that is hotly debated in the literature is the applicability of certain morphosyntactic notions that have been established on the basis of spoken languages to the domain of sign languages, that is, the cross-modal applicability of these notions. Given that sign languages make use of different articulators— the hands, and the head, face and body—in the transmission of lexical and grammatical information, it cannot be taken for granted. After 50 years of research, there is broad consensus that many aspects of the structural make-up of sign languages are modalityindependent; e.g., a prosodic hierarchy, relativization strategies, and reduplication as a morphological process—to give just three examples from different domains (cf Wilbur, 2009; Sandler, 2012; Pfau and Steinbach, 2016). Despite the modality-specific flavor of these articulatory strategies, some sign linguists have argued that, at a sufficiently abstract level, they can be modeled in a modality-independent way (e.g., Pfau et al, submitted; Kimmelman, 2017)
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