This week, Dr. Gregory Anderson will give a talk in the colloquium series “Diversity in Language, Culture and Cognition” (November 29, 3.45pm, MPI 236) at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Here is the abstract: 

Towards a semantic typology of complex predicates: Auxiliary verb constructions vs. serial verb constructions vs. light verb constructions

The terms serial verb, auxiliary verb and light verb have each been used by various authors to cover virtually every complex predicate subtype and it is not clear what a given scholar intends when using them. To put some order into this chaos, I offer a semantic approach to distinguish them across all of the different language groups and traditions. First of all such terms are meaningful only in a larger constructional context. Such formations minimally consist of two elements, one of which is purely lexical. The other element in such constructional frames can be designated the serial verb, auxiliary verb or the light verb. I propose that an element is an auxiliary verb if it contributes functional semantics to the overall constructional sense, a serial verb if it contributes lexical semantics, and a light verb if it contributes no other semantics except instantiating valence and/or serving as an inflectable verbal element in a complex predicate, the other component of which has predicative potential but cannot be inflected as a verbal element in the language for a variety of different reasons (it’s an ideophone, a borrowed stem, phonologically defective, etc.). Examples from many languages are used to demonstrate these claims.