The Syntactic Behaviour of the Second Verb (V2) in the Balinese serial verbs

This paper aims at investigating the types of verbs composing the Balinese serial verbs and analyzing the syntactic behavior of the V2. The theory applied in identifying the Balinese serial verbs is the theory of typology by Van Staden and Ger Reesink (Senft, ed., 2008), while the theory of complement and adjunct by Kroeger (2005) is used in analyzing the syntactic behavior of the V2. This research is classified as a descriptive-qualitative study. The data supporting the analysis was collected from written Balinese texts in the Balinese short stories. This study also used spoken language by native speakers of Balinese drawn through the application of direct observation techniques, and intuitive data obtained from the linguistic intuition of the researchers through introspective techniques. The result of the analysis showed that the Balinese serial verbs were formed by V1 stative – V2 intransitive, V1 intransitive – V2 stative, V1 intransitive – V2 transitive active, V1 active transitive – V2 active-transitive, or stative or intransitive, passive-active-transitive, active transitive-passive, passive-passive. Syntactically the V2 could be either a complement or an adjunct of the V1.