37.731, Reviews: Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World: Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.731, Reviews: Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World: Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.) (2025)

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Date: 22-Feb-2026
From: David D Robertson [spokaneivy at gmail.com]
Subject: Morphology, Syntax, Typology: Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1254

Title: Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/clause-chaining-in-the-languages-of-the-world-9780198870319?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Editor(s): Hannah S. Sarvasy and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

Reviewer: David D Robertson

SUMMARY
(xxvii, 843 pp.) Another ample Oxford typological anthology has
arrived, joining a set of volumes that focus on such previously
under-researched topics as serial verb constructions, evidentiality,
and body-part expressions. In that spirit, Sarvasy and Aikhenvald have
organized numerous contributions here investigating a syntactic
structure that is unfamiliar in standard Indo-European languages, and
is consequently seldom taught in linguistics courses: clause chaining.
This is a sentence construction wherein “one or more ‘medial’ clauses,
with verbal predicates that are formally dependent and usually
under-specified for one or more major inflectional categories such as
tense, mood, modality, or polarity, combine with a single clause of
which the predicate is formally identical to the predicate of an
independent clause” (3). Crucially, the medial clauses are not
embedded in any other clause (ibid.). Clause chaining, then, can be
illuminating for those of us accustomed to a standard analysis wherein
each clause in every language is necessarily ±embedded. In addition,
it tends to interact closely with another phenomenon more common in
non-Indo-European languages, switch-reference marking, which
consequently is also examined in most chapters here.
This volume is bookended by, at its start, the Preface (viii-ix),
Abbreviations and Conventions (x-xxi), Notes on the Contributors
(xxii-xxvii), and at the end, the Index of [cited] Authors (824-831),
Index of Languages, Language Families, and Linguistic Areas (832-836),
and Index of Subjects (837-843).
The material contents of this book begin with an introductory survey:
Chapter 1, “Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World in
Typological Perspective”, by the editors (1-38), with an appended
“Fieldworker’s Guide”, 39-40, to assist in researching clause
chaining. Six sets of studies follow.
Part I, “General Issues in Clause Chaining”, is a cross-linguistic
survey incorporating the insights of the contributed chapters. It
contains Chapter 2 “Prosody in Clause Chaining Constructions” by
Matthew K. Gordon (43-59); Chapter 3 “The Acquisition of Clause
Chaining” by Hannah S. Sarvasy and Soonja Choi (60-96); and Chapter 4
“Clause Chaining and Switch-Reference in Language Contact” by
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (97-125).
The remainder of the book is geographically organized.
Part II examines “Clause Chaining in Languages of New Guinea”. Here we
find Chapter 5 “Clause Chaining in Greater Awyu Languages of West
Papua” by Lourens de Vries (129-148); Chapter 6 “Clause Chaining and
Switch-Reference in Ndu Languages” by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
(149-186); Chapter 7 “Clause Chaining in Finisterre Papuan Languages”
by Hannah S. Sarvasy (187-229); Chapter 8 “Clause Chaining and Other
Means of Clause Linking in Doromu-Koki” by Robert L. Bradshaw
(230-251); Chapter 9 “Clause Chaining in Eibela” by Grant Aiton
(252-275); and Chapter 10 “Clause Chaining in Matukar Panau (Oceanic,
Papua New Guinea)” by Danielle Barth and Malcolm Ross (276-305).
Part III is “Clause Chaining in North American Indian Languages”. One
suspects “Indigenous” was meant: Chapter 11 is “Clause Chaining in
Muskogean Languages” by George Aaron Broadwell (309-334), and Chapter
12 is “Clause Chaining in Uto-Aztecan: A Northern Paiute Perspective”
by Maziar Toosarvandani (335-369); but Chapter 13 is “Delineating
Typological Categories: Central Alaskan Yup’ik” by Marianne Mithun
(370-391).
Part IV reports on “Clause Chaining in South American Indian
Languages”. In Chapter 14 is “Clause Chaining in Aguaruna (Chicham)”
by Simon E. Overall (395-415); Chapter 15 is Kristine Stenzel’s
“Clause Chaining in East Tukanoan Kotiria and Wa’ikhana: Structural
and Pragmatic Features” (416-441); Chapter 16 is “Object-Oriented
Switch-Reference in Pano” by Roberto Zariquiey and Pilar M. Valenzuela
(442-461); and Rafael Nonato contributes Chapter 17 “Switch-Reference
and Clause Chaining in Northern Jê” (462-498).
Part V “Clause Chaining in Languages of Eurasia” includes Chapter 18
“Clause Chaining in Kurtöp” by Gwendolyn Hyslop (501-512); Chapter 19
“Clause Chaining in Dzongkha” by Stephen Watters (513-546); Chapter 20
“Clause Chains and Related Structures in Macro-Tani Languages” by Mark
W. Post and Yankee Modi (547-575); Chapter 21 “Clause Chaining in
Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian)” by Diana Forker (575-602); Chapter 22
“Clause Chaining in Tsova-Tush and East Caucasian” by Felix Anker
(603-622); Chapter 23 “Clause Chaining in Turkic” by Lars Johanson,
Éva Á. Csató, and Birsel Karakoç (623-640); Chapter 24 “The
Development of Clause Chaining in Turkish” by Ayhan Aksu-Koç and Hale
Ögel-Balaban (641-670); Chapter 25 “Clause Chaining in Buryat (North
Mongolic)” by Elena Skribnik (671-701); and finally Chapter 26 “Clause
Chains and Intonation Units in Japanese Narrative” by Patricia M.
Clancy (702-736).
Part VI “Clause Chaining in Languages of Eastern and Southern Africa”
opens with Chapter 27 “The Amharic Converb in Clause Chaining” by
Mengistu Amberber (739-761), followed by Chapter 28 “Converb
Constructions and Clause Chaining in Cushitic” by Yvonne Treis and
Martine Vanhove (762-797) and Chapter 29 “Clause Chaining in Bantu
Languages” by Kristina Riedel and Hannah Gibson (798-823).
EVALUATION
As indicated in my introductory comments, clause chaining is a
widespread syntactic phenomenon that is not well known to most
currently practicing linguists, already meaning that this volume lives
up to the promise of linguistic typology research by filling a gap in
our knowledge. I would like to highlight several ways in which I found
that the editors and contributors have done an especially fine job of
that.
Surveys across various families or geographical regions are the
approach taken by several chapters, as is easily seen from the list
above. This excellently counterbalances the highly focused
single-language deep dives taken by many of the other chapters,
allowing the reader to get a sense of how widespread various features
are, ways various languages implement them differently, and so forth.
In a crosslinguistic survey such as the present book, such a varying
approach is probably more productive of insights than a dedication to
one or the other level of detail.
All too rare in the literature are studies of how children acquire
non-First World languages and the structures thereof. Co-editor
Sarvasy, with Soonja Choi, in particular have done pioneering work by
analyzing L1 acquisition of Nungon (Papua New Guinea) and assembling
in Chapter 2 corresponding data on Pitjantjatjara and Ku Waru
alongside better-known languages: Korean, Japanese, and Turkish. They
contrast this with L1 acquisition of other types of complex sentences
in these and in non-clause-chaining languages. Clause chains are found
to be at least as easily learned and elaborated on as other complex
structures, likely in proportion to their frequency in a given
language. A new single-language study with similar insights is Chapter
24 on Turkish, while Chapter 27 on Japanese allows some comparison
between children’s speech and that of adults up to three generations
older. Acquisition is also thoroughly tracked in the Index of
Subjects. One hopes for more researchers to follow this lead.
Another dimension of analysis that too often is taught shallowly if at
all to aspiring linguists is that of contact among languages and
varieties. Co-editor Aikhenvald’s Chapter 4 establishes that clause
chaining (and switch-reference) is a feature easily transmissible into
languages previously lacking it, whether directly or by areal
influence. Compliments are due to her for troubling to define contact
of languages – as “where a significant proportion of the speakers of
one have some competence in another” – and for pointing out that it’s
a rule, not an oddity, for those languages to “become more similar to
each other, gradually converging towards a common structure” (97).
Such preliminaries are often skipped in the linguistic contact
literature, to the detriment of rigor. Useful generalizations
Aikhenvald arrives at include some perhaps unforeseen, for instance
that clause chains can diachronically simplify into single-clause
formations such as serial verbs, and that their “medial” members can
grammaticalize into conjunctions, adverbs, et al. One suspects that
these sorts of developments can occur without significant contact, due
to typical historical evolution, but contact can tend to accelerate
and make visible what is otherwise hard to detect.
Prosody is another crucial facet of language that, in our urge to
simplify our models, is arguably neglected by virtually every linguist
except a few specialists. This volume does much to redress that
insufficiency by featuring Gordon’s informed Chapter 2 survey before
all other contributions, signaling research priorities. I found
several of his findings compelling for how we might shape future
research, including that semantic cohesion has demonstrable
intonational and rhythmic consequences, so for example pitch rises
tend to signal especially close relation with following material (e.g.
57). Aikhenvald’s “fieldworker’s guide”, a checklist of important
points to research in, in fact highlights the need to consider whether
“any specific prosodic features” typify clause chaining in a given
language. Clancy’s Chapter 26 is an excellent in-depth study of that
kind, on a language whose intonation has otherwise been well studied,
and both Aiton’s Chapter 9 on Eibela, and Barth & Ross’s Chapter 10 on
Matukar Panau also give valuable demonstrations of how to research
this area.
Equally neglected by linguists (of non-signed languages at any rate),
and suggestive of much interesting research to be done, is eye gaze.
In this light, I want to single out Aikhenvald’s Chapter 6 on Ndu
languages, where we learn that both implicit and overt requests for
additional information from an interlocutor are accompanied by a
characteristic eye contact (176). Introductory Chapter 1 notes Sarvasy
et al.’s previous work on “eye-voice span”, which suggests that clause
chaining and/or switch-reference marking is involved in the 3 times
longer advance gaze at a new actor by Nungon speakers than by English
speakers (26). This too promises to be a fruitful area for work by
more of us in the profession.
By now fairly typical in typologically-oriented work, but still
needing promotion in the rest of our discipline, is an attention to
non-canonical uses of any phenomenon under investigation. Not only do
the introductory survey (23-24) and its appended “fieldworker’s guide”
(40) draw attention to various independent uses of medial clauses, but
also various contributors do as well, with illuminating results.
(Examples include Ndu (174-178), Finisterre (222-223), Eibela
(266-268), Dzongkha (538-544), and Japanese (719-722).) Because we are
taught that “all grammars leak”, it behooves us to pursue the ways and
reasons that they violate their own rules.
It is a bit of a shame that of the numerous languages and families
reported on here, Korean does not have a chapter devoted to it. That
isolate is mentioned a number of times, both as having been researched
for children’s acquisition of clause chaining, and also as having
perhaps the most fine gradations within that system, e.g. “Korean may
be the champion clause-chaining language in sheer numbers of medial
verb [MV] markers with differing semantics, about 100” (16). The
example sentence shown on that page includes MV markers glossed
respectively as ‘while’ (2 occurrences), ‘since’, ‘while.doing’, and
‘and.then’. The editors note that in languages with very few MV forms,
these often are semantically flexible; it would be of great interest
to explore which dimensions of meaning crosslinguistically tend to
become formally delineated in larger MV systems.
A final and minor note, but one worth making: previous Oxford
typological anthologies have collected all chapters’ bibliographical
references into a single section at volume’s end, but this time, the
editors have left them contiguous with each contribution. This makes
the reader’s life that much easier.
This theory-neutral, approachable, and informative volume is highly
recommended for students from upper-level undergraduates through
graduate students and field researchers.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
David Douglas Robertson, PhD (University of Victoria, Canada, 2012,
Linguistics) is a freelance consulting linguist who works with the
pidgin-creole Chinook Jargon/Chinuk Wawa and with Southwest Washington
(“Tsamosan”) Salish languages, among others. Current projects include
a grant-funded 3-year “Teach Yourself Northern-Dialect Chinook Jargon”
course; a dictionary and grammar of Lower Chehalis Salish
(Ɬəw̓ál̓məš); and publications on the etymology of the name “Chinook”
and on the Nicola Athabaskan/Dene language of British Columbia. He
publishes daily at http://chinookjargon.com.



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