OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde en Geschiedenis. Jaargang 3

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Serial verbs: a boost for a small lexicon
Mark Sebba

Jan Voorhoeve was, I believe, the first person to make Sranan serial verbs the subject of an academic paper, at the 1975 Hawaii conference. Since then they have been discussed in works by, amongst others, Jansen, Koopman and Muysken (1978), Alleyne (1980), Bickerton (1981), Seuren (1981), and Sebba (1983, and forthcoming).

The debate between ‘Africanists’ - dubbed ‘substratomaniacs’ by Bickerton for their desire to see an African structure underlying the major linguistic structures of Creoles - and ‘Universalists’, who see Creoles as incorporating structures which are (in one or more senses, depending on the writer) universals of human language, is a debate which need not detain us here. It is surely not a coincidence, though, that the languages which have the richest serialising systems as far as we can tell, are the West African languages of the Kwa group, such as Akan (Twi/Fanti), Ijo and Yoruba. Many speakers of these languages must have been among the slaves shipped to Surinam in the formative years of the Sranan language.

What exactly is a serial verb structure? While the nature of the constructions may vary from language to language, there are some general characteristics of serialisation which may be taken as minimally defining. A finite serial sentence contains two or more finite verbs, all of which have the same tense and aspect as the first one. Because of differences between languages in their systems of marking tense and aspect, this means that either each verb must carry the same marker for tense, aspect, mood and polarity, or tense/aspect/mood/polarity marking occurs only once, either with the first or the last verb in the series. This is illustrated by the following examples, the first from Akan, the second from Sranan.

1)	Kofi soaa       dadesan no     kɔɔ       dan     no     mu carry-PAST     pot       the go-PAST     house     the     inside ‘Kofi carried the pot into the house.’
2)	Kofi ben     yagi     a     dagu go na     ini     a     oso T/A     chased the dog     go LOC inside the house ‘Kofi chased the dog into the house.’

In Akan, both verbs (soa and kɔ) are marked as past tense by a lengthened final vowel. In Sranan, the whole sentence is marked as past by the particle ben before yagi.

It can be shown that in Sranan as well as in other serialising languages, serial structures are actually of two kinds. The first, or ‘coordinating’ variety, consists of two coordinated verb phrases. Since tense, aspect, mood and

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polarity are properties of sentences but are external to the verb phrase, the two verb phrases share the same tense, mood, etc. and cannot be marked for these independently of one another. However, there is no direct semantic relationship between the two VPs. Such ‘coordinating’ sentences therefore usually describe two related, but separate events:

3)	yu     e       go broko a     planga kiri mi dya you T/A go break the board kill me here ‘You'll break the floorboards and kill me here.’ [E. Cairo]

The other, and more interesting type of serialisation is one which involves a subordinating structure. The details are explained in Sebba (forthcoming), but in brief, this type of serialisation involves verb phrases embedded within verb phrases on a right branch. One consequence of this is that the object noun phrase NPi of verb Vi may be the subject of Vi+1, the next verb in the series. This is possible because NPi c-commands Vi+1 but is not c-commanded by it. This is a necessary condition for the relation ‘subject’ to hold between a NP and a V. It would not hold between V2 and the object of V1 in the ‘coordinating’ type of serialisation, because the VPs are coordinate and neither is embedded within the other. These characteristics are illustrated by sentences 2) and 3). In 2), the subject of go is a dagu, not Kofi, who may or may not go into the house himself. In 3), however, the subject yu is the one who will break the floorboards and kill the speaker.

When the second verb in a subordinating sentence is transitive, and its object is the same as that of the first verb, that object may occur only once, after V1, and not at all after V2. In this case, the object of V1 does not function as subject of V2, but as its object. Examples are 4) and 5):

4)	Kofi hari     a     ston     puru     na       ini       a     olo pull     the stone remove LOC     inside     the hole ‘Kofi pulled the stone out of the hole.’
5)	Kofi naki Kwaku kiri hit            kill ‘Kofi struck Kwaku dead.’
6)	Kofi fringi a       nyan     trowe     na       ini       a     dyari throw the food     eject     LOC     inside     the garden ‘Kofi threw the food away in the garden.’

The same NP object of the first verb may function as the object of several serial verbs, as in 7):

7)	Kofi hari a       ston     tyari kon     poti na     ini       a     oso pull     the stone carry come put LOC inside the house ‘Kofi dragged the stone into the house.’

Now we come to the question: ‘How is serialisation functional in Sranan?’ In other words, what does it do and how does it contribute to the overall system? My answer to this would be mainly in terms of the properties of the Sranan lexicon. Creoles generally have rather small vocabularies compared with non-Creole languages, and Sranan (although no comprehensive dictionary yet exists) is probably no exception. In addition, to make matters worse, Creoles are typically rather poor in word-deriving morphemes.

Bound morphemes such as un-, -er, re- etc. in English do not have any Sranan equivalent, further reducing the potential of the Sranan lexicon for

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enlargement. However, Sranan has other resources for increasing the referential capacity of its lexicon. Some of these I have described elsewhere (Sebba 1981): serialisation is another one not described there.

By using the second verb of a serial construction where English would use an affix on a simple verb, or a completely different lexical item, Sranan can extend its lexical power. Some examples are given in 8):

8)

serial verbs	English glosses	English equivalent
NAKI KIRI	hit kill	strike dead
ANGA KIRI	hang kill	hang, crucify
BRO KIRI	blow kill	blow out/extinguish
KWINSI PURU	squeeze remove	extract
KRABU PURU	scratch remove	excise/strike out
KOTI PURU	cut remove	cut off/amputate
FUFURU TYARI GO	steal carry go	carry off/abduct

The parallel between serial verbs and word-deriving morphemes is more obvious when Sranan is compared with German, a language especially rich in verbal affixes. The comparison is made easier by the existence of Wullschlaegel's (1856) German-Sranan dictionary, still the best Sranan wordlist available, which includes hundreds of German entries with Sranan serial verb translations. Most of these correspond to German verbs with separable or inseparable prefixes, thus: er-schiessen, (shoot dead), sutu kiri; zertruemmern, (smash to bits), broko masi, (break mash); ab-drehen, (twist off), dray puru; aus-kriechen, (crawl out), kroypi komoto, (creep come-out); wegnehmen, (take away), puru tyari gwe, (remove carry go-away).

The Sranan lexicon is also quite poorly supplied with prepositions, expecially prepositions which refer to spatial relations. Apart from fu, which may sometimes translate English from, all prepositions which denote spatial relations have the form na + N, where N is one of a small set of nouns including ini ‘inside’, baka ‘back’, ondro ‘underneath’, sey ‘side’, etc. Since na itself is neutral as to direction, there are no contrasts in Sranan prepositions between, for example, ‘toward’ and ‘away from’, ‘into’ and ‘out of’, or ‘in(side)’ and ‘into’. However, all these contrasts can be made in Sranan with the aid of serial verbs, as the following sentences show:

9)	A     tyari a     ston     go na       ini       a     oso he     carry the stone go LOC     inside     the     house ‘He brought the stone into th house.’
10)	A     tyari a     ston     komoto     na       ini       a     oso he     carry the     stone     come-out LOC     inside     the     house ‘S/he brought the stone out of the house.’
11)	A     e       dansi     na       ini       a     oso he     T/A       dance LOC     inside     the     house ‘S/he is dancing in the house.’
12)	A     e       dansi     go na       ini       a     oso he     T/A     dance     go     LOC     inside     the     house ‘S/he is dancing into the house.’

In this brief article I have tried to show how Sranan makes good use of a relatively rare syntactic resource, namely serialisation. To end, I will give a list of Sranan verbs which commonly function as V2 in a serial con-

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struction, with examples:

Verb	English gloss	Example
broko	break	fringi en broko: throw and break it
doro	reach	lon go doro: run all the way up to
fadon	fall (down)	watra dropu fadon: water drips down
gi	give	seri buku gi en: sell books to him
go	go	waka go na oso: walk home
gwe	go away	tyari den gwe: carry them away
kiri	kill	fon a srafu kiri: beat the slave to death
komopo	come from	tyari den komopo na Afrika: bring them out of Africa
komoto	come out	yagi den komoto na ini a oso: chase them out of the house
kon	come	tyari den buku kon: bring the books
libi	leave	lon libi a pranasi: run away from the plantation
naki	hit	fringi a tiki naki en: throw the stick at him
poti	put	hari en poti dya: pull it to here
puru	remove	yagi en puru: chase him away
tanapu	stand	dyompo tanapu: spring up
tron	turn (become)	gro tron bigi bon: grow into a big tree
trowe	eject, throw out	fringi a tiki trowe: throw away the stick

References

Alleyne, Mervyn C., 1980: Comparative Afro-American. Karoma Press, Ann Arbor.

Bickerton, Derek, 1981: Roots of Language. Karoma Press, Ann Arbor.

Jansen, Bert, Hilda Koopman and Pieter Muysken, 1978: Serial Verbs in the Creole Languages. Amsterdam Creole Studies II.

Sebba, Mark, 1981: Derivational regularities in a Creole lexicon: the case of Sranan. Linguistics 19: 101-117.

Sebba, Mark, 1983: Serial Verbs: something new out of Africa. Paper presented at the York Creole Conference. To appear in: Sebba and Todd (eds.), York Papers in Linguistics

Sebba, Mark, forthcoming: The Syntax of Serial Verbs: an Investigation of Serialisation in Sranan and Other Languages. University of York D. Phil. thesis.

Seuren, Pieter, 1981: Tense and aspect in Sranan. Linguistics 19: 1043-1076.

Voorhoeve, Jan, 1975: Serial verbs in Creole. Paper presented at the Hawaii Pidgin and Creole conference. Mimeo.

Wullschlaegel, H.R., 1856: Deutsch-Negerenglisches Woerterbuch, nebst einem Anhang, Negerenglischer Spruechwoerter enthaltend. Reprinted 1965 by S. Emmering, Amsterdam.