Serial Verb Constructions: a distributional and typological perspective

Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) are a frequently discussed but poorly defined syntactic feature of many languages around the world. We present the first broad distributional study of SVCs, using the methodology from The World Atlas of Language Structures. We establish a standard definition of SVCs from trends in the literature and look through descriptive grammars for 325 languages to determine the distribution of SVCs, identifying instances in about 40% of the world’s languages, while also looking at similar constructions that vary from this definition. We also test proposed typological correlations for SVCs against a large dataset for the first time.Ope