Diachronica - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2008

While complex predicate constructions, including light verb structures and verb serialisation, are found in many of the world’s languages, there has been little diachronic work on these structures to date. In this paper I survey the state of the field and describe current ideas on the origins and development of complex predicates. In particular, I show that the assumption of cline-like development from parataxis to affix (through serialisation, light verbs and auxiliation) is too simplistic. Finally, I review arguments in favor of and against views of light verbs as stable structures.

In Udi, most verbal lexemes are composed, in all tense-aspect-mood categories, of a light verb and an ‘initial’. It is argued here that in the first stage of this development, simplex verbs were juxtaposed with focused constituents. In the second stage, initials and verbs formed compounds, and this pattern spread beyond those that had once involved focus. In the third stage, the subject of this paper, light verbs become classifiers, classifying the verb type — inchoatives, other unaccusatives, unergatives, transitive verbs of inherently directed motion, transitive change-of-state verbs, other transitives. I argue also that the classes identified by (some of) the light verbs have not become less semantically motivated; rather the semantics has shifted from a relatively narrow meaning to one of the three major classes.

This paper traces the historical development of the Swedish Pseudo-Coordination construction with the posture verb sitta “sit”. In Swedish a small number of verbs, including posture verbs such as sitta, are used in coordination with another verb to convey that the described event has an extended duration or is in progress. Quantitative evidence from Swedish historical corpora suggests that the construction has, even after it established itself as a grammatical construction, undergone a number of gradual changes in the course of the past five centuries. As part of the Pseudo-Coordination construction, the verb sitta has changed its argument structure, and the entire construction has increased in syntactic cohesion.

Many Athabaskan languages have a construction that I call the activity incorporate construction. Activity incorporates are similar in some ways to circumstantial incorporates, entering into non-core thematic relationships with the verb stem. The languages that allow incorporates divide into two major groups based on the treatment of the activity incorporates: in some languages activity incorporates are dependent nouns, functioning as direct objects, while in others they have a suffix that indicates dependency, showing that the activity incorporate is not the head of the construction. In the former, the relationship between the verbal head and the activity incorporate is indicated through the voice/valence system and in the latter, through the suffix on the activity incorporate. Focusing on the incorporate, this looks like a development from parataxis — the activity incorporate and the verb stem are in a non-morphologically marked, loosely construed relationship with one another — to hypotaxis, with overt marking of the relationship between the actions involved. However, when the construction is viewed as a whole, the development of the overt marking of dependency is accompanied by a change in the overt marking of voice/valence. While formally there is a change in structure in terms of how the dependency is indicated, functionally in both cases the dependency relationship between the two elements concerned is indicated in some way, without any change in clausal complexity but rather the location of the complexity.