The languages of the world make use of a variety of techniques for describing events and putting sentences together. This volume takes a typological approach to clause chaining, a fascinating feature of the grammar of hundreds of languages outside Europe, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, East Africa, across Central Asia, and the Americas. Clause chains consist of several dependent clauses and one main clause, and are used to organize discourse and to foreground or background events and participants; they often go together with switch-reference marking, an indication of whether upcoming subjects will be co-referential with preceding subjects or not. The introductory chapter features a discussion of the typological properties of clause chaining, with a brief overview of previous approaches to and investigations of clause chains followed by an overview of their recurrent grammatical features; it ends with an appendix featuring notes for fieldworkers. The first part of the book explores general issues in clause chaining, including prosody, acquisition, and language contact and history; later parts then examine clause chaining and related phenomena in a wide range of languages from around the world.
1: Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: Clause chaining in the languages of the world in typological perspective Part I. General issues in clause chaining 2: Matthew K. Gordon: Prosody in clause chaining constructions 3: Hannah S. Sarvasy and Soonja Choi: The acquisition of clause chaining 4: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: Clause chaining and switch-reference in language contact and language history Part II. Clause chaining in languages of New Guinea 5: Lourens de Vries: Clause chaining in Greater Awyu languages of West Papua 6: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: Clause chaining and switch-reference in Ndu languages 7: Hannah S. Sarvasy: Clause chaining in Finisterre Papuan languages 8: Robert L. Bradshaw: Clause chaining and other means of clause linking in Doromu-Koki 9: Grant Aiton: Clause chaining in Eibela 10: Danielle Barth and Malcolm Ross: Clause chaining in Matukar Panau (Oceanic, Papua New Guinea) Part III. Clause chaining in North American Indian languages 11: George Aaron Broadwell: Clause chaining in Muskogean languages 12: Maziar Toosarvandani: Clause chaining in Uto-Aztecan: A Northern Paiute perspective 13: Marianne Mithun: Delineating typological categories: Central Alaskan Yup'ik Part IV. Clause chaining in South American Indian languages 14: Simon E. Overall: Clause chaining in Aguaruna (Chicham) 15: Kristine Stenzel: Clause chaining in East Tukanoan Kotiria and Wa'ikhana: Structural and pragmatic features 16: Roberto Zariquiey and Pilar M. Valenzuela: Object-oriented switch-reference in Pano 17: Rafael Nonato: Switch-reference and clause chaining in Northern Jê Part V. Clause chaining in languages of Eurasia 18: Gwendolyn Hyslop: Clause chaining in Kurtöp 19: Stephen Watters: Clause chaining in Dzongkha 20: Mark W. Post and Yankee Modi: Clause chains and related structures in Macro-Tani languages 21: Diana Forker: Clause chaining in Adyghe (West Caucasian) 22: Felix Anker: Clause chaining in Tsova-Tush and East Caucasian 23: Lars Johanson, Eva A. Csató, and Birsel Karakoç: Clause chaining in Turkic 24: Ayhan Aksu-Koç and Hale Ögel-Balaban: The development of clause chaining in Turkish 25: Elena Skribnik: Clause chaining in Buryat (North Mongolic) 26: Patricia M. Clancy: Clause chains and intonation units in Japanese narratives Part VI. Clause chaining in languages of Eastern and Southern Africa 27: Mengistu Amberber: The Amharic converb in clause chaining 28: Yvonne Treis and Martine Vanhove: Converb constructions and clause chaining in Cushitic 29: Kristina Riedel and Hannah Gibson: Clause chaining in Bantu languages
Hannah S. Sarvasy is Senior Researcher at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University. Her research combines fieldwork on Papuan, Atlantic and other languages, child language acquisition research, and psycholinguistic experimentation. She is the author of A Grammar of Nungon: A Papuan Language of Northeast New Guinea (Brill, 2017), among other volumes, and led a Nungon-speaking team to build the Nungon Child Speech Corpus, one of the largest digitized corpora of child-caregiver interactions in a Papuan language. She has published multiple studies on the grammar, history, acquisition, and processing of clause chains and switch-reference marking. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor, Australian Laureate Fellow, and Head of Research Cluster 'Language and well-being' at the Jawun Centre, Central Queensland University. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP, 2003) and The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008; paperback 2010), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American and Papuan languages and typological issues including evidentials, classifiers, serial verbs, and language and well-being.
