Variation in Serializing: A New Type of Serial Verb Construction in Croatian?

Tomislav Sočanac, Mia Batinić Angster

Abstract


The paper studies a specific multi-verb construction found in certain dialectal varieties of Croatian, consisting of a volitional verb and another lexical verb that both appear in finite form and agree in person and in number. The constructions in question resemble serial verbs and we show that they share the bulk of the grammatical properties observed with serial verb constructions across languages, such as single-event semantic readings and mono-clausal syntax. Nevertheless, we do not conclusively determine whether the constructions under study constitute genuine serial verbs or (hidden) complementation structures with a silent complementizer da, leaving this question open for future work.

Keywords


Croatian; serial verbs; serialization; complementation; complementizer omission

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2026.50.3.25-39
Date of publication: 2026-10-30 11:37:50
Date of submission: 2026-05-05 15:43:05


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