Serial verbs in Oceanic

[Paul Richard Kroeger]

Joel,

Many thanks for the reference to your 1999 article, it sounds like that
will be a great help.  Avery Andrews and one or two other people have told
me that the famous Akan example you mentioned ('I-pour corn I-flow into
water') may well be the result of a misanalysis of the morphological
structure of the second verb.  But there are at least some languages where
such things happen, notably Tariana (Brazil), as Claire pointed out.  They
are only "normal" in the sense that the two verbs share a grammatical
subject, or at least the morphological features.

-- Paul
===================

 On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, Joel Bradshaw wrote:

> Paul,
>
> 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'.)