Yoruba serial verb string commutability constraints

Abstract

Up to now, much work on the serial verb construction has been devoted either to the historical derivation of the construction or to its synchronic grammatical status. By focusing on a hitherto neglected aspect of the serial verb construction, that of the commutability constraints on verbs operating in concomitant serialization, this paper uses examples from Yoruba to highlight both the relatedness of verb serialization to other types of syntactic typology and the shortcomings of current research on the derivation of the serial verb construction. We set up a positional semantic classification of verbs which facilitates the prediction of permissible, doubtful, and non-permissible serial verb strings, showing (i) the commutability restrictions arising from such a functional-semantic classification and (ii) how various reductionist derivational explanations of the serial verb phenomenon can arise from undue concentration on one or the other of the various verb semantic functions. The utility of the approach dopted here is further illustrated by its capacity to handle an indefinitely long string of verbs, thus releasing verb serialization research from overconcentration on only two verbs in series.