Elements – verb enclitics in the present case – are not considered in isolation, but in their structural environment. Constructing a course of grammaticalization for such an element does not reduce to an exercise in etymology.

The combinatory constraints on the grammaticalized item reflect constraints on the source construction.

The postulation of a grammaticalization process on the basis of synchronic variation involves the dynamicization of this variation, based on grammaticalization theory.

In some cases, the grammaticalization relationship between two constructions which contain the identical material persists into the synchrony. In other cases, the particular construction which must be the source of the grammaticalized construction got lost underway, but at least the lexical item which was recruited for grammaticalization still exists.

If one had, in the synchrony, only the pattern of the variation – in the present case, the verb series alternating with the enclitic verb complex –, but no pair of diachronically identical items figuring in it, postulating an origin of the enclitic verb complex by grammaticalization of a verb series would be a more or less probable hypothesis based on typological evidence, but would not be cogent. Consequently, the present analysis is transferable to other languages which possess serial verbs and verb enclitics; but this transfer will only be plausible to the extent that the target language possesses pairs of a verb and an enclitic which are diachronically identical.