Three-Participant Events in Serial Verb Constructions and the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Three-participant events are typologically encoded in a variety of ways. The encoding strategy examined in this study is the serial verb construction [SVC]. In contrast to the three-place predicate strategy used typically in non-serializing languages, the serial verb strategy involves a sequence of two or more verbs. They function together as a single predicate and share the three participants between them (Margetts and Austin 2007). The aim of this study is to show that the syntax-semantics interface developed by Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005) provides a useful descriptive and theoretical framework for a typological investigation of SVCs encoding three-participant events. The resulting analysis reveals the syntactic and semantic properties of SVCs that differentiate them from both three-place predicate constructions and clause chaining (multi-clausal) constructions.