Serial Verb Constructions in English and Chinese

Traditionally, the term serial verb construction refers to a sequence of verbs or verb phrases in a sentence in which there is no intervening conjunction. The English expression go eat, for example, might be considered as a kind of serial verb construction since there is no infinitive or other morphosyntactic marker present to indicate a coordinating or subordinating relationship between the two verbs go and eat. English is traditionally termed as a non-serial language; however, this does not suggest that in English there is no serial verb construction (SVC). Chinese is classified as a serial language; however, according to the results obtained from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese only one out of five sentences contains serial verbs though Chinese is thought to have high frequency in serial verbs. In fact, the issue of serial or non-serial language is basically a matter of frequency.