SENĆOŦEN: A Grammar of the Saanich Language

9 Serial Verbs

In §8 you learned that SENĆOŦEN has only one preposition. English has around fifty of these small words that come before noun phrases and indicate notions like location, position, and direction. Some examples of English prepositions are ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘to,’ ‘on,’ ‘at,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ and ‘from.’ It may have occurred to you to wonder, since SENĆOŦEN has only one preposition, how does it express all of these location and direction ideas? The answer to this is that location and direction are expressed in SENĆOŦEN and other Coast Salishan languages primarily by the use of verbs that indicate direction and location as well as motion.

It is verbs in SENĆOŦEN, not prepositions, as in English, that express the ideas of ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘to,’ ‘on,’ ‘at,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘from,’ and so on. This is a major difference between SENĆOŦEN and English. Another major difference is that these verbs can be strung out in the sentence one after another. Verbs used in a series with only one subject are called serial verbs.

English can string two or three verbs together in some limited ways. An example is ‘run go get help,’ where three verbs ‘run,’ ‘go,’ and ‘get’ are strung together. However, in English this is not generally usable. For example, in English we cannot say ‘*I ran go got help’ or anything similar with verbs in series. In SENĆOŦEN, on the other hand, this kind of sentence, with one subject and two or more verbs is very common.

In this section, you will see examples of how these serial verbs work in SENĆOŦEN. Not every verb can be freely used in series—most common are verbs that indicate motion or location.
 

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page has tags: