The morphosyntax of verbs of motion in serial constructions: a crosslinguistic study in three
signed languages
Elena Benedicto
Purdue University, USA
Sandra Cvejanov
Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Argentina
Josep Quer
ICREA - Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Background. Supalla’s (1978, 1985) classic analysis of verbs of motion and location in
American Sign Language (ASL) considers the movement of the hand as the root of such
verbs. Obligatory classifier morphemes referring to the entity that moves or gets localized
are attached to the root. Other affixes such as those indicating direction or manner of motion
can also combine with the verb root. The outcome of this morpholexical process is a
complex classifier construction that realizes the different components of the sign in a
simultaneous fashion.
The core ideas of Supalla’s proposal have been adopted in subsequent studies of verbs of
motion in ASL (cfr. Liddell, 1980; Wilbur, 1987), but also in several other sign languages
such as Argentine Sign Language (LSA; see Massone & Machado 1994, Cvejanov 2002),
Catalan Sign Language (LSC; see Fourestier 1999).
One of the main conclusions of these investigations is that the affixation process is not free.
Specifically, Supalla (1990) argued for the existence in ASL of certain grammatical
restrictions on the cooccurrence of classifier morphemes and movement affixes: in general,
a body part classifier that combines with morphemes indicating manner of locomotion does
not coappear with path affixes. Consequently, in order to express path and manner of
locomotion in a motion event, two separate verbs are required. Thus, for instance, the ASL
utterance corresponding to the English translation “A person was running uphill” features a
sequence of two verbs: the first one includes a body part classifier and manner morphemes,
while the second one involves a relatively unmarked classifier (i.e. CL:1 or CL:B) and
morphemes for path and direction of motion. Supalla argues that such a sequence of two
verbs is a serial construction, and he offers at least two pieces of evidence for this
conclusion: (i) no noun or pronoun can intervene between the two verbs, and (ii) the order
of the two verbs involved in the construction is fixed (namely, verb of manner of
locomotion + verb of path of motion).
Goals. This paper offers a crosslinguistic analysis of the morphosyntax of the serial
constructions featuring a manner of locomotion verb and a path verb. To this end, we
examine the properties of the corresponding constructions in three signed languages: ASL,
LSA and LSC. The main goal is to ascertain whether the kind of construction under
examination constitutes a serial verb or not, given the restricted variation attested in the
data. The non-separability of the two verbs seems to be a robust crosslinguistic fact, unless
two separate clauses are at stake. The ordering restriction, though, turns out to be language
particular.
Empirical coverage. The serial constructions under study display in ASL the obligatory
sequence manner verb-path verb, which has been claimed to be universal (Slobin and
Hoiting 1994, Baker 1989). LSA, on the other hand, though also displaying a preferred
sequence manner verb-path verb (see (1)-(2), LSA) can also, under certain circumstances,
display the path+manner sequence.
(1)
MANi CL(2-handed):1i legs-limping CL:1i-GO-FROM-Loc1-TO-LOCy VILLAGEy
‘The man limped to the village.’
(2)
BIRDi CL(2-handed):armsi wings-flyingCL:Bi GO-AWAY
‘The bird flew away.’
A somewhat more complex situation arises in LSC, where alongside structures of the type in
(1) and (2) one can also find two other types: (i) one where the ordering is path verb-manner
verb (see (3)-(4)); and (ii) one with some sort of ‘sandwich’ construction (path-manner-path,
and manner-path-manner).
(3)
MANi CL:1i-GO-FROM-Locx-TO-LOC1 CL(2-handed):1i legs-limping
‘The man approached me limping.’
(4)
BIRDi CL:Bi GO-AWAY CL(2-handed):armsi wings-flying
‘The bird flew away.’
Analysis. First, the monoclausal character of the construction from a syntactic point of view
can be established empirically by the uniqueness of the core inflectional projections, as
evidenced by the structural behavior of (a) manual and nonmanual negation markers, and (b)
aspectual markings.
Second, we evaluate two different types of analysis for Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs):
those that appeal to a doubly headed VP, such as Baker’s (1989), vis-à-vis those that resort
to a larsonian VP-shell structure similar to the one used for resultative secondary predication
(as proposed in Larson 1991) or to an adjunction structure (as in Law & Veenstra 1992,
Veenstra 1996). Based on that evaluation, our analysis proposes a structure based largely on
the VP-shell approach; head movement operations are responsible for the crosslinguistic
variation in word order observed above, as well as for the adjacency requirement of the two
Vs involved and other distributional properties. Among them we address the issue of the
‘shared argument’ and the questions it raises: the two Vs involved in these constructions are
intransitives but, at least in principle, of different types (unergative and unaccusative) and,
thus, their respective arguments have a different structural status (external and internal,
respectively). The VP-shell approach allows, without further stipulation, a straightforward
representation of those individual properties of the Vs involved.
References
Baker, M. 1989. Object Sharing in Serial Verb Contructions. In Linguistic Inquiry 20:513-553.
Collins, C. 2002. Multiple Verb Movement in +Hoan. In Linguistic Inquiry 33.1:1-29.
Cvejanov, S. 2002. Incorporación en verbos de movimiento de la lengua de señas argentina. MA thesis.
Fourestier, S. 1999. Verben der Bewegung und Position in der LSC.
Larson, R. 1991. Some Issues in Verb Serialization. In C. Lefebvre (ed) Serial Verbs: Grammatical,
Comparative and Cognitive ApproachesI. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Law, P. & T. Veenstra. 1992. On the Structure of Serial Verbs Constructions. Linguistic Analysis 22: 185-217.
Liddell, S. 1980 American Sign Language Syntax. The Hague, Mouton.
Massone, M. and M. Machado. 1994. Lengua de Señas Argentina. Análisis y vocabulario bilingüe. Buenos
Aires: Edicial.
Slobin, D. and N. Hoiting. 1994. Reference to Movement in Spoken and Signed Languages: Typological
Considerations. Paper given at the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Supalla, T. 1978. Morphology of verbs of motion and location in American Sign Language. In Proceedings of
the Second National Symposium of Sign Language Research and Teaching
Supalla, T. 1990. Serial Verbs of Motion in ASL. In Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, Vol. 1:
Linguistics, eds. S.D. Fischer & P. Siple, 127-152. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Supalla, Ted. 1985. 'The Classifier System of American Sign Language', in C. Craig, (ed.), Noun
Classification: Proceedings of a Symposium on Categorization and Noun Classification, 181-214.
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Veenstra, T. 1996. Serial Verbs in Saramaccan. Predication and Creole Genesis. The Hague: HAG.
Wilbur, R. 1987 American Sign Language. Linguistic and Applied Dimensions. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.