Serial verbs with motion verb.

[Claire Bowern]

Hi everyone,
I'm putting together a sketch grammar of Titan (one of the Admiralty
Islands languages), based on Josef Meier's texts that he published in
Anthropos from 1905-1912. You won't be surprised to learn that Titan has
serial verbs... It's especially fond of nuclear serial verb constructions
with a motion verb as the first verb ('go and do Y'). Some of the
sentences, however, have this serial construction and a goal with one of
the motion prepositions, as in "go to X and do Y", as in "X go eat to Y".
In many cases the action Y is totally incompatible with motion (eg "go to
Palitawi village and grind sago", not "go and grind sago to P. village").
These can't be interpreted as "go and do Y _at_ X" as the prepositions
involved always convey motion and not location. I was wondering if this is
common in other languages. It's surprising to me in Titan because these
"serial verbs" are usually semantically rather unevenly weighted, and the
first verb usually behaves more like an auxiliary than a full verb,
providing tense, aspect and associated motion information. It seems odd to
have it governing adjuncts in this way. Any references and examples would
be appreciated!

Claire


_________________________
Claire Bowern

Department of Linguistics
Harvard University
305 Boylston Hall
Cambridge, MA  02138
fax: 617-496-4447
ph: 617-547-3521
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~bowern/