Serial Verb Construction in Abua

Abstract

Serial verb construction (SVC) is a global phenomenon in the worlds’ languages; pidgins and creoles are no exception. Linguists working in the Benue-Congo family of languages attest to the fact that SVC is common in this family of languages. Different approaches have been adopted to account for it; experts are of the view that its origin, existence and productivity relate to the functional load of the inflectional categories of verbs or prepositions in specific languages. This paper examines the existence of SVC in the Abua language, and if it does, we intend to correct certain misconceptions and misrepresentations in the account for SVC. By way of methodology, we elicited data from our respondents, analyzed the data and identify SVC in the Abua language. We found out that SVC involves two principal verbs sharing one predication and one argument. At the same time, these main verbs share value for tense, aspect and represent a single event. This distinctive syntactic and semantic characteristic of SVC fosters serious theoretical challenges. This study evinces that characterizing SVC and making generalizations about its typology is indeed a difficult call to make. The evidence from our data suggests a number of properties that SVC language must have. Based on these underlying semantic and syntactic properties of SVC, we assert that the Abua language has SVC.