A Serial verb construction (or SVC) is one in which a single clause contains two or more verbs, neither of which is an auxiliary. The term “serial verb” has been used by different authors in slightly different ways, and linguists sometimes disagree about whether a particular construction in a given language is “really” a serial verb or not. We will not attempt here to formulate a precise definition that will clear up all these gray areas. Rather, we will focus on describing the most important features of the “prototypical” SVC, i.e., characteristics of those serial verb constructions which everyone agrees belong to this category. As a way of introducing this discussion, let us consider a type of causative construction which is similar in many ways to those discussed in chapter 8, but also different in ways which make it relevant to the current chapter.

Causative constructions in French

Causative constructions in Romance languages are periphrastic, in the sense that they contain a verb meaning ‘cause’ which is morphologically independent of the base verb. However, they can also have many of the properties associated with morphological causatives. In particular, some of these constructions can be shown to be monoclausal, even though they contain two verbs. In this sense they are similar to serial verb constructions.

French, like English, lacks a morphological causative; but it has two different types of periphrastic causative.