This study provides a formal and functional account of a type of complex predicate which frequently occurs in English and Spanish conversation but has not been previously addressed in the literature. Examples (1) through (4) contain four instances of this construction from a database of 100 tokens from two corpora of natural occurring conversation in both American English and Iberian Spanish.

The constructions in bold face in (1) through (4) bear formal and functional similarities to an array of constructions identified in various non-Indo-European languages: the serial verbs of Sino-Tibetan (Foley and Olson 1985), the construction previously identified by Mithun (1988) as ‘andative’ for Iroquoian, and the construction identified by Matisoff (1991) as ‘versatile verbs’ for Lahu (Tibeto-Burman). However, I will argue that these English and Spanish constructions are formally and functionally more similar to the construction identified by Noonan (1985) for Lango (Nilotic) as ‘conjunctive complementation’.

From a formal point of view, English and Spanish conjunctive predicate constructions consist of a finite main verb from a very restricted lexical set, an optional intervening copulative conjunction and a finite complement verb. The restricted set of conjunctive predicates consists of the intransitive motion verbs go and come in English whereas in Spanish the set consists of the intransitive verbs venir ‘come’ llegar ‘arrive’ and the transitive coger ‘take’.

Regarding their function in discourse, conjunctive predicate constructions are found in particular junctures within conversational narrative sequences (Sacks 1974, Goodwin, 1984) and procedural sequences (Gallardo-Pauls 1993). The constructions occur when returning to the ‘body’ (Goodwin 1985) or ‘backbone’ (Longacre 1976) after a digressive embedded parenthetical sequence (Goodwin 1984) or ‘side sequence’ Jefferson (199).

Thus, for example, in the excerpts of narrative sequences in (1) and (3), a parenthetic sequence has been interpolated after which a conjunctive predicate is employed to return to the body of the story. In (1) such a sequence spans from lines 4 to 6 in which the interlocutors are trying identify the referent Tibby. In example (3) the speaker inserts a parenthetical comment on his story in line 2. After such parentheses in both examples, the narrators employ a conjunctive predicate construction to continue the development of the story in lines 4 and 5, respectively.

Examples (2) and (4) illustrate the use of conjunctive predicates in procedural sequences. Thus, in (2), the parenthetical sequence in lines 3 and 4 consists of a temporal grounding expression after which the conjunctive predicate go get is employed to return to the telling of the procedure of blacksmithing. In (4), a question-answer pair is inserted by the interlocutor to ensure a complete understanding of the procedure; after this parenthetical pair, the conjunctive construction van y dicen ‘they go and say’ is employed to return to the main development of the procedure.

Thus, conjunctive constructions emerge as the syntactic conflation of two pragmatically related predicates in narrative and procedural sequences. The first predicate positions a topical participant for a subsequent action within the main story line expressed by the second predicate. The present study thus provides a formal and functional account of conjunctive predicate constructions as a special type of complex predicate that is commonly found in both English and Spanish conversation but has not received attention previously in the literature.

Examples:

(1) (HOWARD’S) (Corpus of Spoken American English of U.C. Santa Barbara)
1 EVELYN: Margaret brought em all= together.
2 KIM: and when they married,
3  %and when uh= .. they married, did uh=,
4  .. uh what was his name, the uh= .. wimpy little son?
5  Tibby? the bro- --
6 SUE: Tibby
7 ? KIM: .. and the young girl come and live with them

(2) (BLACKSMITH) (Corpus of Spoken American English of U.C. Santa Barbara)
1 LINDA: .. (H) Well anyway,
2  you go get your -
3  .. Okay,
4  this is after you trimmed em.
5        ? .. (H) And you go get your shoe,

(3)  (UNAM)
1 A: Yo paso     así como si no pasara nada. Nada, al final no me pillaron.
  ‘I got into the subway like I wasn’t up to anything, so I didn’t get caught.’
2  Bueno, primera hazaña. Es en un mismo día     todo, eh?.
  ‘So this is the first stunt so far. Now, all this happened in the same day!
3 ? Después cogimos y nos metimos en el Corte Inglés a     mangar discos.
  ‘Then we got [Lit: we took and got] into the Corte Ingles to steal some records.’

(4) (UNAM)
1 A: Luego cuando la terminas te tienen que dar otra para que la rellenes.
  ‘Then when you´re done, they have to give you another for you to fill out.’
2 B: Y luego es un regalo sorpresa?
  ‘And is it a surprise gift?’
3 A: Sí, también hay regalos sorpresa.
  ‘Yes, there are surprise gifts.’
4 ? Luego van y dicen: "Enhorabuena. Te ha tocado un... unos   puntos". Y te dan los puntos.
’Then, they say [Lit: go and say], “Congratulations you’ve earned some points,” and they give you the coupons.’

REFERENCES:
DeLancey, Scott. 1991. ‘The Origins of Verb Serialization in Modern Tibetan.” Studies in Language. 15-1. 1-23.
Foley, William, and Mike Olson. 1985. Clausehood and Verb Serialization. In: J. Nichols and A. C. Woodbury (eds.) Grammar Inside and Outside the Clause. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Longacre, Robert. 1976. An Anatomy of Speech Notions. Lisse: Peter de Ridder.
Matisoff, James. 1991. “Areal and Universal Dimensions of Grammaticalization in Lahu.” In: Closs Traugott, Elizabeth and Bern Heine (eds.) Approaches to Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mithun, Marianne. 1988. ‘The Grammaticalization of Coordination.’ In: Haiman, John, and Sandra Thompson. (eds.) Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Noonan, Michael. 1985. Complementation. In: Shopen, Timothy (ed.) Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. III Complex Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gallardo-Paúls, B. 1993. Lingüística Perceptiva y Conversación: Secuencias. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, Department de Teoria dels Llenguatges.
Goodwin, Charles. 1984. Notes on Story Structure and the Organization of Participation. In: Atkinson, Maxwell and John Heritage (eds.) Structures of Social Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Back to the Conference Schedule