Serial verbs in Oceanic

[Claire Bowern]

>It may not be a coincidence that the major repository of switch-subject SVCs
>occur in Melanesia, in some proximity to canonical switch-reference
>languages--principally Papuan, but some AN as well. (On the other hand, I
>don't
>see why the African SVCs with illogical same-subject agreement markings on VPs
>that clearly have different logical subjects should be considered the "normal"
>ones. SVCs on the pattern of 'I-pour corn I-flow into water' seem weird to me,
>when it clearly means the 'corn' ends up in the water, not 'me'.)

Avery Andrews has done quite a bit of work on these, especially to do with
Tariana (an Amazonian language). The main reference is

Andrews, Avery. D, 1997. Complex predicates and nuclear serial verbs. In M.
Butt and T. H. King (Eds.), Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference. University
of California, San Diego: CSLI Publications. (+ refs therein)

Given the odd sorts of things that languages feel they need to mark
agreement about, the matrix clause subject isn't the oddest, no? ;-)

Claire

_________________________
Claire Bowern

Department of Linguistics
Harvard University
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