Clause chaining in Finisterre Papuan languages

Abstract This chapter shows clause chaining is a robust feature of all documented languages of the proposed Finisterre language group in Madang and Morobe Provinces, Papua New Guinea. In the ten best-documented of these languages, clause chains are a prominent, frequently used, complex sentence type. Medial verbs bear suffixes indicating switch-reference; same-subject (SS) suffixes do not also involve agreement with the marked clause’s subject, while different-subject (DS) suffixes do. In all ten languages, the subject person/number desinences used in DS marking, which are cognate across the languages, are formally similar to the subject desinences used in contrafactual inflection, and, usually, also immediate imperatives. The languages can be divided into three groups based on the complexity of the medial verb systems; maximally complex systems involve multiple medial markers with different relative-temporal and -aspectual semantics. Most languages exhibit non-canonical medial clause use, bridging linkage, and grammaticalized or lexicalized functions of two-clause chains.