serial verb

In SYNTAX, a type of CONSTRUCTION for a sequence of VERBS or verb PHRASES within a CLAUSE (or a sequence of clauses) in which the syntactic relationship between the items is left unmarked. The verbs share a semantic ARGUMENT, but there is no CONJUNCTION or INFLECTION to mark CO-ORDINATION or SUBORDINATION: for example, in the Yoruba sentence O ra eran je (‘3rd-person buy meat eat’) ‘meat’ is simultaneously the object of both verbs. The verbs may both be MAIN verbs or vary in their syntactic status (e.g. one might function more like an AUXILIARY or a PARTICLE). Serial verb construction is not an important feature of English, though it can be seen in such sentences as I’ll go see.