Qinzhou Zhuang is a less studied Zhuang dialect in the Tai Branch of Kam-Tai Group of Tai-Kadai Language Family. This dissertation investigates aspects of the Verb Phrase (VP) in Qinzhou Zhuang and presents an analysis of Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). The aims of this dissertation are two-fold: (i) to provide a descriptive account of the structure of the VP in Qinzhou Zhuang, and (ii) to apply the framework of LFG to the analysis of SVCs in Qinzhou Zhuang and thus to extend the empirical coverage of the theory.

Taking a broad sense of VP, this study proposes an overall structure of the VP based on the investigation of the main verb, pre-verbal and post-verbal elements in Qinzhou Zhuang. SVCs in this dissertation refer to constructions in which two or more lexical verbs are used in a series without any phonetic pauses or conjunctions; the order of verbs should present a kind of time order; all the verbs share the same subject and have the same polarity, e.g., negative or affirmative. Based on the definition and the properties proposed in this study, eight types of SVCs are attested in Qinzhou Zhuang, which are benefactive, instrumental, manner, motion, posture, purposive, resultative, and sequential SVCs. A contrastive study of the types of SVCs in Qinzhou Zhuang and Thai shows that there are similarities and differences as well between the two languages. This study provides an in-depth analysis of manner SVCs and purposive SVCs in the framework of LFG. Both manner SVCs and purposive SVCs demonstrate the general properties of SVCs in Qinzhou Zhuang. In addition to that, each of these two types of SVCs can be further divided into two subtypes and each subtype demonstrates different syntactic features, a phenomenon that cannot be found in the other six types of SVCs.

Manner SVCs and purposive SVCs show similarities and differences with regard to the syntactic features of verb order, negation, and aspect marking. An XCOMP analysis in the framework of LFG is employed to analyze manner SVCs and purposive SVCs in Qinzhou Zhuang. It is demonstrated that the syntactic feature of subject sharing in both manner SVCs and purposive SVCs and the syntactic feature of object sharing in purposive SVCs can be captured by the XCOMP analysis.

This study shows that SVCs in Qinzhou Zhuang demonstrate common features which can be found cross-linguistically but it also shows that SVCs in Qinzhou Zhuang have their own features. It is hoped that this study can shed light on further study of Qinzhou Zhuang and of the cross-linguistic typological study of SVCs in Southeast Asian languages.

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