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The serial verb construction in Chinese: A tenacious myth and a Gordian knot

Abstract The term “construction” is not a label to be assigned randomly, but presupposes a structural analysis with an associated set of syntactic and semantic properties. Based on this premise, the term “serial verb construction” (SVC) as currently used in Chinese linguistics will be shown to simply refer to any multi-verb surface string i.e,. to subsume different constructions. The synchronic consequence of this situation is that SVCs in Chinese linguistics are not commensurate with SVCs in, e.g., Niger-Congo languages, whence the futility at this stage to search for a “serialization parameter” deriving the differences between so-called “serializing” and “non-serializing” languages. On the diachronic side, SVCs are invoked as a privileged site for verb-to-preposition reanalysis, but it is left open what structure is referred to under this label. A precise structural analysis of both the input and the output structure is, however, indispensable in order to make meaningful statements about language change.