Clause chaining in Muskogean languages

Abstract This chapter focuses on Muskogean, a family of six languages spoken in the Southeastern United States. All Muskogean languages have a nominative-accusative orientation, active verb agreement, and extensive switch-reference systems. There are two principal kinds of clause chaining in most Muskogean languages. One type of clause chaining has participle-like, largely same-subject relationships between adjacent clauses, with reduced inflectional possibilities for non-final verbs. This type does not fully contrast same-subject and different-subject in the switch-reference system. The second type of clause chaining occurs with adjunct clauses, shows full inflectional possibilities for subordinate verbs, and uses the switch-reference system extensively. Western Muskogean languages (Choctaw and Chickasaw) have an additional type of clause chaining, labelled consecutive, which shows an omission of tense marking on the subordinate clause along with a contrastive same-subject vs. different-subject distinction.