| Generally speaking, a serial verb construction (SVC) structurally refers to the juxtaposition of multiple verbs (or verb phrases) in a clause without any overt coordinate or subordinate markers conjoining them. Not all languages in the world present this verb serialization feature, that is, this complex construction is regional with respect to the geographical distribution. Chinese has been defined as being a typical serializing language, while this is not the case with English in a traditional sense until recently catenative verb construction (CVC), a structure of verb complexes, in English is justified as a type of SVCs.Some typological characteristics have been discussed in the relative literatures, such as argument sharing (including object sharing and subject sharing), operator sharing, TAMP constraints, connector restrictions, etc. Chinese SVCs have gained currency worldwide since this topic has been touched upon by Li & Thompson (1974; 1981), and a lot of works have been unveiled home and abroad around this phenomenon.This dissertation conducts a cross-linguistic analysis of the syntactic and semantic features of serial verb constructions in Chinese and English based on the structural-functionalist theory of grammar by Van Valin (1997), i.e. Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). Syntactically, a set of syntactic templates model has developed to present constituent projection mechanism of this construction in both languages, and the abstract linkage relations, i.e. the juncture-nexus relations, between units in a clause are expounded as well. Semantically, this study defends the view that the serial predicates are juxtaposed in a SVC to express a single event or action with some kinds of interclausal semantic relations.Such an integrated analysis contributes to giving a clearer understanding of the nature of how Chinese and English organize complex events or actions in different ways, which is conducive to the practice of foreign language teaching and cross-linguistic translations. |
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