Bilingual serial verb constructions: A comparative study of Ewe-English and Ewe-French codeswitching

Abstract The paper compares serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Ewe-English and Ewe-French codeswitching (CS) spoken in Ghana and Togo respectively. It argues that Ewe, the Matrix Language (ML) in both cases, sets the morphosyntactic frames of bilingual SVCs and, thus, determines their structural possibilities. It demonstrates this by looking at the various properties of SVCs in monolingual Ewe (including monoclausality and the expression of aspect and modality categories) and comparing them to the ones found in Ewe-English and Ewe-French CS structures. It also demonstrates this by looking at the expression of complex motion using Talmyʹs (2000) typology. Although English and French belong to different types with English being satellite-framed and French being verb-framed, and, although neither language has SVCs, complex motion is expressed in CS with SVCs. The facts are accounted for by using Myers-Scottonʹs (1993, 2002) Matrix Language Frame model. One major significance of the paper is that it is the first cross-linguistic study of bilingual SVCs. It predicts that for bilingual SVCs to be characteristic of CS, the ML has to have SVCs even if the other language, the embedded language, does not have them.