Serial Verb Constructions are a thing I have not said a lot about this far, and they're a thing I really really should learn more about and come up with ideas about. Now, guitarplayer approached me with an idea over irc, an idea based on a certain set of possibilities that serial verb constructions have.
There are different possibilities with regards to agreement in SVCs. Some languages seem to require them, some languages do not. Limited congruence is also conceivable - say, number but not person, gender but not person, etc.
This is a place where we could sneak in differential convergence. Having different types and amounts of of convergence between the verbs could encode differences in TAM. A thing I find it fairly probable to encode as well could be the amount of volition the subject had.
Serial verb constructions are a thing I definitely should post more about, since they are pretty unusual by European standards but common elsewhere. However, I should probably read several books on them before any further writing about them.
For what it's worth, the following text made me think about it:
ReplyDeleteAikhenvald, Aleksandra Y. 2006. "Serial Verb Constructions in Typological Perspective." In: Serial Verb Constructions: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Ed. by Aleksandra Y. Aikhenvald and Robert M. W. Dixon. Explorations in Linguistic Typology 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1–69, here 37–44.