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MONOCLAUSALITY AND EVENT
CONCEPTUALIZATION IN SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS
Melanie Owens Stanford University Tuesday, May 2, 5:30 PM MJH Rm 126 Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Program Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) are monoclausal utterances containing sequences of verbs with identical tense, aspect, mood and polarity categories, where there is no marking of coordination or subordination between the verbs. This talk emphasizes monoclausality as the core defining requirement of SVCs, arguing that the inclusion of only those constructions which display monoclausal behaviour in every grammatical respect results in a more balanced picture of the cross-linguistic distribution of SVCs. In contrast, some of the least balanced pictures of the cross-linguistic class of SVCs result from definitions which incorporate the requirement that a SVC describe `a single (non-sequential) event'. These moreover obscure the nature and degree of temporal and event structural variation in SVCs. Temporal and event structural variation in SVCs is here illustrated through different event structure representations attributed to SVCs, and these can additionally be organized along a continuum, from the most tightly integrated non-sequential structures to more loosely associated combinations of sequential subevents. An initial exploration of the temporal and event structural variation which inheres in SVCs is conducted by identifying the conditions under which certain types of SVCs have sequential semantics (countering claims that they are uniformly non-sequential), in which case they are always temporally iconic (countering claims that they can be inverse temporally iconic). The loosest event structures permitted in SVCs are then compared across languages, and it is asked what constraints on SVC formation can reveal about the human cognitive process of partitioning the continuum of time and space into privileged units that we term `events', and how monoclausality (independent of SVCs) bears upon this in general. 
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