West African serial verb constructions

Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) are a construction type that consists of more than one verbal predicate, with none of the verbs taking the other as a complement. They are distinct from auxiliary constructions and, as opposed to Complex Predicate constructions, ¹ their predicate components are not nouns or adjectives, but only verbs. The phenomenon was first described by Christaller (1875, p. 141) for Twi, and Westermann (1907/1930) for Ewe. The notion ‘Serial Verb Construction’ was first used by Balmer and Grant (1929), taken up in Stewart (1963), and is by now a recognized name of the construction. The growing availability of detailed descriptions of serialization across languages has led to a better understanding of the differences between particular forms of serialization, ² but has also led to growing doubts in the usefulness of the term as it might not refer to a sufficiently coherent phenomenon (most recently Bisang 2009).