This article compares serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Ewe-English and Ewe-French codeswitching (CS), spoken respectively in Ghana and Togo. It claims that Ewe, the Matrix Language (ML) in both cases, fixes the morphosyntactic frames of bilingual SVCs and thence decides their structural potential. It portends that for bilingual SVCs to be typical of CS, the Matrix Language needs to possess SVCs even if the other (embedded) language does not possess them.