Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World
Hannah S. Sarvasy · Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Feb 2025 · Oxford University Press
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About this ebook
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.
About the author
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.
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