This book provides an in-depth typological account of the forms, functions, and histories of serial verb constructions. Serial verbs, in which several verbs combine to form a single predicate, describe what is conceptualized as a single event. The verbs in the construction have the same tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality values, cannot be negated or questioned separately, and usually share the same subject and object. They are a powerful means of portraying various facets of one event, and can express grammatical meanings such as aspect, direction, and causation, particularly in languages where few other means are available. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald seeks to answer unresolved questions such as: What are the parameters of variation in serial verbs? How do serial verbs differ from other, superficially similar multi-verb constructions? How do serial verbs emerge, and what happens to them over time? What role do they play in the representation of event structure? The book uses an inductively-based framework for the analysis and draws on data from languages with different typological profiles and genetic affiliations. It will be of interest to researchers and students from a wide range of fields of linguistics, especially typology, anthropological linguistics, and language contact.

"Aikhenvald has performed a great service by providing linguists with both a framework and an explicit vocabulary for describing and analyzing serial verb phenomena, not to mention an extensive empirical database of illustrative forms. Given the broad implications that SVCs have for syntactic and semantic analysis, general linguists cannot afford to miss out on the insights of this valuable book. They will find it a pleasure to read such a well-written book." - Sanford B Steever, THE LINGUIST

"The book not only captures an impressively diverse linguistic phenomenon, but its author achieves this in an impressively reader-friendly manner. Aikhenvald's "Serial verbs" will thus equally appeal to advanced students of linguistics, linguists interested in SVCs or the syntax-semantics interface in general as well as anyone with a basic linguistic knowledge and a curiosity about the diversity of human languages." - Thomas Schwaiger, Linguist List