SERIAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE KENYANG LANGUAGE

Mbu Martha Njui

Department of English and Foreign Languages,

Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences,

University of Douala

Email: mbumatha80@yahoo.fr

Abstract

Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) are widely attested syntactic phenomenon  in the languages  of West  Africa, Creole languages, Languages of South East Asia, Amazonia ,Oceania and New Guinea. Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) are not restricting to languages of a typological profile. They are widespread clearly recognizable robust grammatical constructions found in nearly one-third of the Languages of the world. The phenomenon of verb serialization obviously has a syntactic side. A series of two or more verbs enter into grammatical relations with each other and with other constituents of the sentence in particular ways. But the serial verbs are related to each other; if they are coordinated “small sentence, embedded predicates or heads of double or triple ups. Though what might be considered as a typical serial construction consists of a sequence of two or more verbs acting together like a single verb, different languages present a number of variations on this theme. The properties regularly found with serial construction can be seen both as key characteristics of the unity of verbal series or as consequences of this unity.  Kenyang like many other African Languages has what is call serial verb constructions and they can be found in both simple and complex sentences. This paper describes the structure of this phenomenon in Kenyang; a Bantu Language spoken in the South West Region of Cameroon. The structural approach is adopted in the data presentation to highlight some of the cross-linguistic universals on Serial Verb Constructions ﴾SVCs﴿ in order to properly characterised the linguistic features in Kenyang.

Keywords׃ Serial Verbs, Tense Sequence, Consecutive Series, Cumulative Series