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

International audienceThe 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 di-achronic 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