Clause Chaining in the Languages of the World

Abstract The ways of describing events and putting sentences together vary across the languages of the world. Clause chains consist of several dependent clauses and one main clause, whose order reflects the sequence of sub-events. Clause chaining is a feature of the grammars of hundreds of languages outside Europe, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, in East Africa, across Central Asia, and in the Americas. This volume aims at providing a state-of-the art view of clause chaining across continents in its various guises. Special focus is on the analysis of clause chains in the world’s languages within a typological perspective, contributing to the appreciation of linguistic diversity. The introductory chapter features a discussion of typological properties of clause chaining with a brief guide for fieldworkers. Each of the 29 chapters focuses on a topic, a linguistic area, a language family, or a single language, within the domain of clause chains and clause combining.