This paper examines the 517 instances of serial verbs in a corpus of colloquial conversational Indonesian. I provide a general overview of the grammatical form and semantic functions of serialization observed in the corpus. I also demonstrate that the data provides no evidence for considering Indonesian serial verbs to be 'reduced complements' (where the initial verb takes the subsequent verb as an argument).

Structurally, Indonesian serial verbs occur contiguously with no intervening material, fall under a single intonation contour, and share at least one argument. These characteristics are among those noted by previous typologically-oriented works on serialization (e.g. Foley and Olson 1985, Durie 1997, Aikhenvald 1999, inter alia).

Functionally, a broad range of semantic relationships exists between the verbs in serial constructions, and these are observable in the 517 examples in the Indonesian corpus. These include: manner, purpose, causation, coordinated action, and constructions in which the initial verb is a verb of modality or manipulation. This latter subtype has the semantics typically associated with 'reduced complement' clauses (cf. Noonan 1985, Givón 1990, inter alia).

I will argue, however, that there is no structural evidence in the Indonesian data to justify a grammatical distinction among subtypes of serial verbs. Rather, speakers must infer the relationship between the verbs based on context and verb meaning. The juxtaposition of two verbs in Indonesian is not isomorphic with any particular grammatical functions.

Based on this observation, I argue that a linguistic category of 'reduced complements', wherein the initial verb takes the subsequent verb as an argument, is not justifiable in colloquial Indonesian. It is indeed true that many of the instances of serial verbs in the data are semantically quite similar to complements in other languages, but no structural evidence exists in the Indonesian data to claim that one verb is an argument of the other. There is, however, prosodic and grammatical evidence to suggest that the two verbs form a complex predicate within a single clause (cf. papers in Alsina et al. 1997). Thus, I suggest that Indonesian serial verb constructions are best analyzed as a single clause with a complex predicate, and not as a biclausal 'reduced complement' structure.

In addition to giving a general, corpus-based overview of Indonesian serial verbs, this paper underscores the principle that grammatical categories need to be argued for on a language-specific basis, and not simply assumed from semantic similarity and cross-linguistic trends.

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 1999. Serial constructions and verb compounding: evidence from Tariana (North Arawak). Studies in Language 23.3:469-498.

Alsina, Alex, Joan Bresnan and Peter Sells (eds.) 1997. Complex predicates. CSLI Lecture Notes 64. Stanford: CSLI.

Durie, Mark. 1997. Grammatical structures in verb serialization. In Alex Alsina, Joan Bresnan and Peter Sells, eds. Complex Predicates. 289-354. Stanford: CSLI.

Foley, William and Mike Olson. 1985. Clausehood and verb serialization. In Johanna Nichols and Anthony Woodbury, eds. Grammar inside and outside the clause. 17-60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Givón, Talmy. 1990. Syntax: a functional-typological introduction. vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Noonan, Michael. 1985. Complementation. In Timothy Shopen, ed. Language typology and syntactic description. vol. 2. 42-140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.