For 12th Biennial Rice University Linguistics Symposium, 27-29 March 2008
On the origins of serial verb constructions in Kalam, 
or, What are clauses good for?

Andrew Pawley
Australian National University

1. What are clauses good for?*1
In 1975 I attended a mind-stretching course on language taught by George Grace at the University of Hawaii. In this course and in two later books (Grace 1981, 1987) he reminded us that human languages have evolved as devices for saying things.*2 He commented that linguists in general, preoccupied with formal structures, had paid little direct attention to the question of what is entailed in saying something. This seemingly innocuous question requires us to ask about how the brain works in making sense of the world, how speakers turn perceptions and thoughts into linguistic expressions, and (among other things) how they connect these expressions with the minds of their audience. In the 1970s most linguists were content to leave such concerns to philosophers and psychologists. *3
	The core ingredient in saying something is specifying a conceptual event or situation (Grace uses ‘event’ as a cover term for both). Following Greenberg (1959), Grace observed that only human languages can analytically specify events, saying, e.g., who did what with whom and to whom, when and where. In order to be seen as saying something, however, the speaker must also (a) contextualise the expression for the audience, e.g. by connecting it to the previous discourse or to assumed shared knowledge, (b) give it a modality (as assertion, question, negation, contingency, etc.), and (c) take responsibility for the expression (as its author or sayer, in contrast, e.g. to reading a passage from a book).
	The quintessential linguistic device for constructing a sketch of a single conceptual event is, of course, the independent clause or simple sentence. The prototypical clause has a single verb that represents the action or state. (For the moment I will leave aside the problematic nature of event segmentation and simply assume that each lexical verb in an utterance represents a separate conceptual event or sub-event,)*4 Multi-clause constructions, by contrast, are used to construct more complex propositions. 
	Grace’s observations set me thinking about the relation between clauses and events in Kalam, a language I had worked on for some years, and which belongs to the large (400 member) Trans New Guinea (TNG) family.*5 Kalam has clause-like constructions that depart quite sharply from the one lexical verb per clause prototype. In narrative speech it is quite common to find a serial verb construction (SVC) that contains several lexical verbs strung together under a single intonation contour with very little other material in the clause. Example (1) contains such a construction with seven verbs. (Here and in later examples, verb roots and their glosses appear in bold face. In multi-clause examples, successive clauses are distinguished as i, ii, etc. Usually each clause begins on a separate line.)*6

(1)	am	mab	pu-wk	d	ap	agl	kn-la-k.
	go	wood	hit-break.up	get	come	ignite	sleep-3PL-PAST
A fairly literal English translation of (1) would occupy several clauses: ‘They went and gathered firewood and brought it, made a fire and slept.’ (mab has the senses ‘tree’, ‘wood’, ‘firewood’ and ‘fire’.) A free translation might say simply, ‘They gathered firewood for the night’, where the act of gathering can, in context, be understood as implying the other activities typically associated with this. 
	In example (2), clauses (ii) and (ii) both contain eight verb roots, if we exclude the iteration of one verb, g ‘do’.
(2)	I	....kayn	ak	ney	awsek	am-ub,
	 		dog	the 	he	alone	go-PERF.3SG
		‘...the (hunting) dog, he goes out alone,
	ii.	ñn	ak 	ognap	wtsek	d	ap	tan	d 	ap	yap
		day	the	some	pursuing	get	come	ascend	get	come	descend
	g	g	suw-p, 
	d	do	bite-PERF.3SG
	some days he goes about chasing all over the place and makes kills, 
	iii.	ñn 	ak 	ognap	wt-sek	d	ap	tan	d 	ap	yap
		day	the	some	pursuing	get	come	ascend	get	come	descend
	g	g	met	nη-l,
do	do	not	find-SS.PRIOR
some days after chasing (animals) back and forth and not having caught any, 
	iv.	adkd		katp	ow-p.
		turning.back (adv.)	house	come-PERF.3SG
		he comes back home.’   (KHT ch.19, #28)

The type of construction represented in (1) and (2ii,iii) is referred to here as a ‘narrative serial verb construction’. There is in principle no limit to the number of uninflected verbs that can occur in a narrative SVC. (In practice – if we exclude iteration of verb roots to show repetition or continuity – the limit seems to be about nine or ten.)
Many languages that lack SVCs have ways of accommodating an extra verb or predicate phrase within a syntactic frame that is more or less clause-like, e.g. as secondary predicates or embedded small clauses. *7 But not many languages allow four or five verbs, let alone nine or ten, in a clause. How did such constructions arise? Why would anyone want to squeeze a report specifying each of a long sequence of events into a single clause frame? Are these constructions really single clauses?
In addressing these questions this paper will compare the forms and functions of four kinds of Kalam constructions that depict sequences of events – one multi-clause and three single-clause constructions. I will draw on a considerable body of published work on this language. More generally, I will ask whether the Kalam material provides evidence bearing on Givón’s (1979) proposal there are diachronic processes of syntacticization that follow a sequence of condensation:
discourse  syntax  morphology/lexicon  morphophonemics  zero 

by which loose, paratactic, “pragmatic” discourse structures develop – over time – into tight, grammaticalized syntactic structures. For each one of these processes one could prepare a balance sheet of communicative gains and communicative losses. The principles which control the balance of gain and loss here are, presumably, what we are investigating. (Givón 1979:208). 

Before we examine the Kalam data something needs to be said about how to measure ‘syntactic complexity’. A standard measure is by depth of constituent structure – the more levels or intermediate nodes the greater the complexity, with particular weight given to the embedding of clause-like constituents inside phrases.  However, one might also view the complexity of a particular construction in terms of how much brainwork is required to process the information in it, either as an encoder or decoder. (It needs to be kept in mind that in information theory the amount of ‘information’ carried by an item is measured by the number of possible choices facing the encoder or decoder.) 
Let me refer here to just a few of a number of studies that have looked at syntactic complexity in terms of mental processing costs. Discussion of an experimental study of Kalam that does the same can be found in section 3.1.
Drawing on data from the Pear Stories narratives and conversational transcripts, Wallace Chafe has for many years argued that when speakers encode different sized units of information they make use of different kinds of consciousness or levels of attention (Chafe 1979, 1980, 1987, 1994). He distinguishes a ‘focus of consciousness’, a short-lived concentrated focusing of attention, from ‘peripheral’ or ‘semi-active consciousness’, where information is held in the mind but is not in focus. During a single focus of consciousness a speaker can encode a limited amount of information, typically one new ‘idea unit’ representing an event or state. The focus typically occurs in a pause of less than a half a second before a short burst of fluent speech. Such fluent bursts have a mean of about six words in length, typically fall under a single intonation contour and often correspond to a clause. Leaving aside memorized clause sequences, it seems that the simple (single verb) clause is a unit that encompasses roughly the amount of information that can easily be organized and encoded in a single, planning act. 
A broadly similar proposal was made by Givón (1975, 1984), who argued that “the majority of sentences/clauses in connected discourse will have only one chunk – be it nominal, predicate (verb or adjective) or adverbial word/phrase – under the scope of asserted new information. All other elements in the clause will tend to be topical, background or presupposed old information” (1984:258).  Du Bois (1987) put forward evidence that speakers, when encoding connected discourse, generally avoid more than one new argument per clause. 
	Chafe suggests that severe constraints on the amount of new information that can be held in the mind in a moment of active consciousness reflect a limitation in the evolution of the mammalian mind. “Our powers of remembering and imagining have far outstripped those of other creatures. But this development has failed to include any increase in the capacity of active consciousness… We are capable of thinking grand and complicated thoughts, but we can still focus our active consciousness on only very small parts of them at one time” (1994:140).
	By contrast, ‘scanning a center of interest’ is an extended process in which a certain range of related information held in ‘peripheral’ or ‘semi-active’ consciousness is explored and organized. It is typically associated with a break of more than a second in the speaker’s discourse flow. The linguistic outcome is often an extended sentence, made up of a sequence of discrete bursts of speech, each representing a different idea unit, strung together to describe, say, a single episode or scene.
	The long, paragraph-like macro-sentences one often finds in narrative speech result from the mind scanning a center of interest. Here the speaker holds several bits of information in mind at a less active level of consciousness and attempts to activate them, one by one.  But speakers don’t know exactly how things are going to turn out and, not surprisingly, the results are not always completely coherent, from a grammatical or semantic standpoint.
	In the mid 1970s Frances Syder and I independently came to quite similar conclusions about how clauses and multi-clause sentences are encoded, while transcribing a corpus of conversational English speech (Pawley and Syder 1975, 1983, 2000), though without proposing the evolutionary underpinnings that Chafe puts forward. We observed that single independent clauses, of up to about eight words, are typically uttered as bursts of fluent speech, under a single intonation contour. In contrast, conjoined clauses are typically spoken as a series of intonation units, separated by (often short) pauses. And when speakers commit themselves to a more complex sentence frame, where two or more clauses are highly integrated, and the lexical strings are novel, they often end up in a tangle. We concluded (a) that it is possible to encode the full lexical detail of short clauses in a single planning act, because this detail approximately matches the amount of information humans can activate and hold in their working memory and (b) that speakers cannot, in a single planning act, encode novel lexical combinations across independent clause boundaries. We referred to the latter limitation as ‘the one clause at a time constraint’.*8
	We also addressed the paradox that in order to have nativelike fluency in a language like a native one must be able to produce many multi-clause sequences as fluent chunks, in apparent contradiction to the one-clause-at-a-time constraint. The explanation seems to be that multi-clause fluent sequences include large chunks that are memorized, so that the parts of these chunks do not represent new information. We concluded, for this and other reasons, that nativelike fluency in a language depends to a large degree on having memorized a large body of clause-sized constructions whose lexical content is completely or partly specified.

2. Notes on Kalam grammar
Let us now turn to the Kalam material. This section outlines some features of Kalam grammar relevant to the discussion that follows.*9

2.1 Word classes
Of the major parts of speech – nouns, verbs, verb adjuncts, adverbs, adjectives and locatives – verbs and verb adjuncts are of particular relevance here. 
	Verbs are the only part of speech to carry inflectional suffixes marking tense, aspect or mood, subject person-and-number, and anticipatory switch reference. Verb roots are a small, closed class with about 130 members.  There are no morphological processes for deriving new verb stems. However, the stock of verb roots is augmented by several classes of multi-word predicates, including verb adjunct constructions and serial verb constructions.
	Verb adjuncts are words (either free form roots or derived words) that occur only as the partner of one verb root, or a few verb roots, with which they form a complex predicate, called a verb adjunct construction (VAC), e.g. suk ag- (laughing say) ‘to laugh’, kleηd am- (crawling go) ‘to crawl’, gadal badal g- (higgledy-piggledy do) ‘place things higgledy-piggledy or criss-crossed’.  (In these examples verb adjuncts and their literal glosses are underlined.) VACs form an open class of predicates with several hundred recorded members, often translatable by a single verb in English. In VACs the verb root serves as a classifier, marking the event as being of a certain general type. The verb adjunct specifies the subtype or specifies an associated activity to that depicted by the verb root. A VAC can occur as a predicate by itself or it can fill a verb slot in a serial verb construction. 

2.2 Verbal clauses
A verbal clause consists minimally of an inflected verb.  In transitive clauses the unmarked order of major constituents is Subject Object Verb. If there is a secondary object it usually precedes the primary object, as in (3). 
(3)	An	np		moni	ñ-a-k?
	who	you		money	give-3SG-PAST
	‘Who gave you money?’
	Arguments already established in the discourse or otherwise recoverable from the speech context are usually omitted.
	Only one inflected verb is allowed in a clause. Verbal clauses are classified according to the kind of inflected verb that is the head or obligatory element. A clause headed by an independent verb can stand alone as a complete sentence. Independent verbs carry suffixes marking subject person-and-number and tense/aspect/mood with absolute reference (i.e. deictic reference with respect to the speech situation). A clause headed by a coordinate-dependent verb (see 2.3) cannot form a complete sentence but must occur in a coordinate relationship with an independent clause. (However, dependent clauses sometimes occur alone when the context allows missing material to be inferred.)

2.3 Chaining of coordinate-dependent (medial) clauses
Coordinate-dependent verbs (often called medial verbs in descriptions of Trans New Guinea languages) are dependent on the final clause in a sentence for a full interpretation of their tense-aspect and subject reference. They carry suffixes marking subject and tense reference relative to the next verb: whether the verb has the same subject (SS) as the next verb or a different subject (DS), and whether the event denoted by the verb is prior to, simultaneous with or future to that of the following verb. However, in other respects they are coordinate with, rather than subordinate to the final verb, hence the name ‘coordinate-dependent’, used by Foley and Olson (1985).
	The most common suffixes marking same subject and relative tense are -l  ‘SS:prior’, -lg ‘SS:simultaneous’ and -ng ‘SS-future’. The basic forms of the different subject markers are -e- ‘DS:prior’ and -knη ‘DS:simultaneous’. A coordinate-dependent verb marked for change of subject in the next verb carries a separate suffix marking the person-and-number of its own subject, e.g. kn-na-knη (sleep-2SG-DS:simultaneous) ‘while you were sleeping (someone else did…)’.
	It is common for a long chain of medial (coordinate-dependent) clauses, marked for same subject and relative tense, to precede an independent clause. Sometimes such chains number more than 15 clauses.  In example (4), clauses ii-ix constitute a chaining construction within the larger construction consisting of clauses i-x. A non-final intonation juncture (written here as a comma) must occur after each coordinate-dependent clause except the final one, that which immediately precedes the independent clause. Because zero anaphora is the norm for established subjects and objects it often the case in such chains that clause after clause consists just of an inflected verb, as in clauses v-ix. 
(4) 	i.	… aps-basd=yad	md-elgp-al		won ok, 
		grandmo.-grandfa.=my	live-PASTHAB-3PL	time that
		‘…at the time when my grandparents were alive,
	ii.	kmn=nen	gos 	nη-l, 		iii.	am-l, 
		game=after	thought	perceive-SS.PRIOR		go-SS.PRIOR
		having planned to go after game mammals,		having gone out,
	iv.	kmn		tap	nb	ogok	ti	ti	d-l,
		game	food	like	those	what	what	obtain-SS.PRIOR
		having gathered various plants for (cooking with) game mammals,
	v.	ad		 ñb-l,			vi.	kn-l, 		 	
		cook	eat-SS.PRIOR			sleep.SS.PRIOR
		having cooked and eaten them, 		having camped out overnight,
	vii. am-l, 			viii.	ap-l,	 
		go.SS.PRIOR				come-SS.PRIOR 	
		having gone out, 			having come back, 
	ix.	 g-elgp-al 		ak,
		do-PASTHAB-3PL	topic	
		those (things) they used to do, 
	x.	mñi	ag-ngab-in.
		now	say-FUT-1SG
		I am now going to talk about.’
 ‘I’m now going to describe how, in the time of my grandparents, when people planned to hunt game mammals, they would go out and gather certain plants and cook them in stone ovens and eat them, and sleep out (in the forest), and after going out and coming back (to camp) they would do these things.’

2.4 Embedding
Kalam freely allows clauses to be embedded as sentential complements, as in (5), and in relative clauses. 
(5)	Yad	[tumuk	ag-p]			nη-b-in
	1SG	thunder	say-PERF.3SG	perceive-PERF-1SG
‘I heard thunder’ (lit. approximately, ‘I heard thunder speak’. One cannot say ‘I heard thunder’, with a simple nominal as object.)

Arguably, the entire sequence of clauses i-x of (4) above is the complement of the final verb ag-ngay-n ‘I will speak (about)’.

2.5 Serial verb constructions
The predicate of a serial verb construction (SVC) in Kalam has as its nucleus a verb series, in which one or more bare verb roots precede an inflected verb root without any intervening conjunctions, as in (1), (2 ii, iii) and (4 v) above and in (6) below. 
(6)		Am	d	aw-an!
		go	get	come-2SG.IMP
		‘Fetch (it)!  (lit. ‘Go get (it) and come!’)

	All SVCs have a number of characteristics, grammatical, semantic and phonological, that support the view that they belong to a single clause.
	Only the final verb in the series is marked for tense/aspect/mood. This marker has scope over all the verbs in the SCV. All the verbs in the SCV share the same overt subject; this can be represented lexically only once and only the final verb in the series can carry a subject-marking suffix. Only one object NP can occur and this is shared by all transitive verbs in the SVC. Only one negator can occur. In most kinds of SVC it has scope over the whole verb series.
	The verb series is almost always uttered without internal pause and within a single intonation contour. The shortness of Kalam verb roots is an advantage. Verb roots are mostly monosyllabic and some consist of a single consonant. Thus the sequence of eight verb roots, wik d ap tan d ap yap g- (rub get come ascend get come descend do), meaning ‘massage s.o., rub. s.t. all over’, consists of just six syllables and takes no longer to say than excommunicated or indefatigably. Even including nominal and adverbial constituents, narrative SCVs seldom exceed 15 syllables and can comfortably be fitted into a single intonation contour.

2.6 Canonical vs grammaticalized SVCs
There are several types of SVCs. It is useful to make a first division between canonical and grammaticalized SVCs.*10
	In a canonical SVC each verb root has a lexical meaning and denotes a distinct conceptual (sub-)event in the event sequence denoted by the clause. To the extent that the events represented in a SVC are temporally discrete, their order matches the temporal order of the verbs that represent them. All the events are of roughly equal semantic importance, i.e. none are subordinate to another.
	In a grammaticalised SVC the final verb in the series, while it carries the TAM and subject-marking inflections, takes on a ‘grammatical’ meaning that is distinct from the meaning(s) it has when it stands alone as a lexical verb. For example, the ditransitive verb ñ ‘give, transfer, connect’ serves as a dative marker. An intransitive verb, md ‘stay, exist, live’, has been recruited as an emphatic continuative marker. At least six transitive verb roots have been recruited as emphatic completive markers. The six verbs, with some of their most common lexical senses, are ask ‘avoid, abandon, leave’, d ‘hold, get, control, stop’, ju ‘withdraw, extract’, l ‘put, become stable’, tk ‘sever, interrupt’, and yok ‘move away, displace’. Each verb in its completive function tends to co-occur with a different set of verbs from the others. A full account of the uses of grammaticalized verbs would require a separate paper. A fairly detailed treatment is given in Lane (2007).
	Some of the main features common to SVCs are further illustrated by each of the three clauses in (7). Clause i contains a canonical verb series. Clauses ii and iii each contains a verb series with a grammaticalized final verb (d- marks completive with reference to the actor having finished, l- marks the object as being completely affected by the action).

(7)	i.	Ami…	taw	tb	tk-l,	
		mother	step	cut	sever-SS.PRIOR
‘My mother… having stamped on and closed off (the entrance to the bandicoots’ burrow),
	ii.	tug		tb	tk		d-e-k,…
		holding.in.hand	cut	sever	finish-3SG-PAST
		took hold of them (one by one) and closed off (the entrance) 
	iii.	mey	pak	l-a-k			mamd	ak,…
		thus	kill	finish-3SG-PAST	five		that
		and in this way killed all five,...’ (KHT ch. 10, #21)

3.  Types of canonical SVCs
A fairly clear distinction can be made between two types of canonical SVC: compact and narrative.*11

3.1 Compact SVCs
Compact SVCs contain two or more lexical verb roots that form a single tight-knit predicate, as in (7i,ii) above and (8):

(8)		Kaj	tb	lak-eb-al. 
		pig	cut	split-PRES.PROG.3PL
‘They are butchering pigs.’ (lit. cutting them up by splitting, i.e.  making a (first) longitudinal cut)

	The verbs in a compact SVC denote sub-events that are close-spaced in time and typically connected in a causal chain. In some cases the connections people make between the constituent sub-events are probably grounded in innate perceptions of observed happenings. In other cases the connections depend on culture-specific knowledge of customary behavior. 
	Syntactically, a compact SVC is a nuclear layer predicate in the sense of Foley and Van Valin (1984) and Foley and Olson (1985). No non-verb elements can be inserted between verb roots (other than verb adjuncts, which count as part of a verb). Compact SVCs have the ‘macro-event property’ defined by Bohnemeyer et al. (2007): temporal operators, such as tense markers and temporal adverbs, have scope over all sub-events in the construction.
	Compact SVCs fall into many types according to their particular semantic and grammatical makeup. Just a few types will be illustrated here (a fuller account appears in Pawley, in press a). It is important to note that each type represents a productive pattern. For example, the verb series in (8) represents a productive formula in which V1, tb ‘cut, chop’, combines with V2, a verb of result, where V2 can be, e.g. blok ‘distribute’, kluk ‘gouge, hollow out’, pag ‘break, snap’, sak ‘chip, break off a fragment’, tk ‘sever’, wk ‘break apart, shatter’, yk ‘open’, yok ‘move away’.
	For each of the types exemplified in (9)-(12) below the productive patterns are defined by the accompanying notes.

 (9)	Verb series denoting resultative or change of state events
 In the simplest case, resultative SVCs contain just two verbs: V1 is transitive and specifies an activity performed by an agent, usually forceful contact. V2 is intransitive and specifies a change of state or a movement undergone by an affected entity. The conventional meaning derived from the sequence is that the state or movement is the result of the first event. The overt subject of a resultative SVC is always the agent of V1. The logical subject of V2 is not represented.

	pak cg-	(strike adhere)	‘stick s.th. on, cause s.th. to adhere’ 
	pak wk-	(strike shattered)	‘knock s.th. to bits, shatter s.th’
	pak sug-	(strike extinguished)	‘put out (a fire)’
	pug sug-	(blow extinguished)	‘blow out (a flame)’
	puηl ask-	(pierce open)	‘prise s.th. open’
	puηl lak-	(pierce split)	‘split s.th by wedging or levering’ 
	taw pag yok-	(step.on broken displace)	‘break s.th. off by stepping on it’ 
	tb kluk yok-	(cut gouge displace)	‘gouge s.th. out’

(10) Verb series denoting testing or discovering events
An activity verb or verbs precedes the generic verb of perception and cognition, nη ‘perceive, be conscious, aware, see, hear, feel, smell, know, etc’.

	ag nη- 	(say perceive)	‘ask, enquire, ask for, request’
	ap nη-  	(come perceive)	‘visit s.o., come and see s.o.’
	ay nη- 	(put perceive)	‘try to fit s.th., try s.th. on (e.g. clothing)’ 
	d nη- 	(touch perceive)	‘feel s.th. by touching (deliberately)’
	ñb nη- 	(consume perceive)	‘taste s.th.’
	puηl nη- 	(pierce perceive)	‘probe, test by poking’
	tag nη- 	(travel perceive)	‘sightsee, travel and see’
	taw tag nη- 	(tread walk.about perceive)	‘test (ground, branch, etc.) by treading’

(11) Verb series denoting transfer/connection events
A transitive verb precedes the generic verb of transfer, ñ ‘give, connect, etc.’, which denotes transfer of the referent of the affected object of V1 to the recipient of V2.

	ag ñ-	(say transfer)	‘tell s.th. to s.o.’
	d jak ñ-	(get stand connect)	‘stand s.th. against a place’
	d ñ- 	(get transfer) 	‘give s.th. personally, hand s.th. to s.o.’
	g ñ-	(do transfer)	‘fit s.th. in position, connect to s.th.’
	ju ñ-	(withdraw transfer)	‘return s.th. to its owner, give back’
	ñag ñ-	(shoot transfer)	‘fasten s.th., pass s.th. through and 					connect it (in sewing, buttoning)’
	tk ñ-	(write transfer)	‘write s.o. (a letter)’

(12) Verb series denoting transporting events
A verb of manipulation, usually d ‘hold, handle, touch, get, have, control’ combines with one or more verbs of locomotion.
	d ap-	(get come) 	‘bring s.th.’ 
	d am-	(get go)	‘take s.th.’
	d am yok-		(get go move.away)	‘get rid of s.th, take s.th. away’
	d ap tan-	(get come ascend)	‘bring s.th. up, fill s.th.’
	d ap tan jak-	(get come rise reach) ‘bring s.th. to the top, fill s.th. up’
	d ap tan d ap yap-	 (hold come ascend hold come descend)	 ‘move s.th. up and down, or ‘move s.th. back and forth’

	Some compact SVCs consist of a compact SVC plus another verb, or another compact SVC. For instance, the last verb series in (12) is a compact SVC that itself consists of two compact SVCs, d ap tan + d ap yap, whose order can be reversed. 
	Why do the Kalam have compact SVCs? An answer was proposed by Givón (1990, 1991), who carried out an experiment investigating the cognitive processing of different kinds of verb sequences in three languages spoken in Papua New Guinea: Kalam, Tairora, a very distant relative of Kalam spoken in the Eastern Highlands Province, and Tok Pisin, a creole whose grammar and semantics has been heavily influenced by Austronesian and Papuan languages of Melanesia.
A six minute action film was shown to speakers of each language. Each subject was asked to provide two narratives describing what happened in the film, one spoken ‘on-line’ (during a second viewing of the film), one ‘(immediate) post-view’. Three types of constructions were compared where successive verbs have different degrees of contiguity and grammatical integration: independent clauses, coordinate-dependent clauses, and serial verb sequences. Kalam makes heavy use of SVCs, Tairora moderate use and Tok Pisin much less use. Kalam and Tairora both make extensive use of clause-chaining constructions, using coordinate-dependent verbs, but Tok Pisin does not have this type of construction.
The hypothesis predicted that speakers will pause most often after an independent verb (not highly integrated with the next verb), less often after a coordinate-dependent verb (middling degree of integration) and least often after a serial verb (where the verbs are part of the same predicate phrase).
	The hypothesis was strongly confirmed. Kalam narrators paused between the verbs in a serial verb construction only in about 4 to 5% of cases, similar to the hesitation rate within single words. They paused much more often at boundaries between coordinate-dependent clauses (about 23-32% in on-line narratives and about 48-60% post-view narratives) and consistently paused after independent clauses (81% on-line and 71% post-view).  Although Kalam speakers used far more SVCs than speakers of the other two languages, all three languages displayed similar overall patterns of pause probabilities, with inter-clause transitions showing a much higher rate of pausing than transitions between verbs in a SVC.  Givón commented that:
In terms of temporal packaging, serial-verb clauses, on the one hand, and prototypical main/finite clauses, on the other, behave as two extreme points on this scale: the former as co-lexical stems (or grammatical morphemes) within a clause; the latter as full-fledged independent clauses. However, chain-medial verbs exhibit pause probabilities and adjacency probabilities somewhere between the two extreme poles. (Givón 1990:49)
He concluded that serial verbs in Kalam and Tairora are consistently co-lexicalized (or in a minority of cases, co-grammaticalized) because they “display pause probabilities that fall within the range of lexical words” (1990:48).  The main function of SVCs in Kalam, he said, is to augment the small stock of verb roots.  That is to say, SVCs serve to encode conceptual events that are usually denoted by single verbs in languages with large open verb classes. 
	I think Givón’s conclusions are valid for compact SVCs and grammaticalized SVCs. As we shall see, they do not fit so well with narrative SVCs.*12 Plainly many compact SVCs have meanings similar to English simple causative verbs and to certain kinds of phrasal verbs. Upwards of 500 compact verb series have been recorded and all are included in the dictionary of Kalam (Pawley and Bulmer 2003) on the grounds that they are standardized expressions. 
	A number of compact SVCs show morphological fusion in progress, where phonological reduction has blurred morpheme boundaries, e.g. in the following pairs the second form is now the conventional one:  tk pag (sever break) ‘break s.t. in two’ > tpag-, pk pag (hit change.form/break) ‘bend forcefully, break or damage with a blow’ > ppag, and pk wk (hit break.up) ‘smash up, pound to pieces’ > puwk. 
	How did compact SVCs arise? It is reasonable to argue that, long ago, they developed by clause union. But unlike narrative SVCs (as we shall see), compact SVCs are not readily paraphrasable by chaining constructions. Take the verb series tb wk (cut break.up) ‘cut to bits, chop up’. One can say:

(13)		Bangay	tb-i, 	wk-p-in.
		pumpkin	cut-SS.PRIOR	break.up-PERF-1SG

using a same subject chaining construction but this means ‘Having cut (the) pumpkin, I then broke it up’. This implies a sequence of two distinct events, clearly separated in time, without a clear causal connection. The causal connection can be achieved by a two clause sequence which is marked for change of subject:

(14)		Bangay	tb-e-n-k,			wk-a-k.
		pumpkin	cut-DS.PRIOR-1SG-PAST	break.up- 3SG-PAST

This translates as ‘I chopped the pumpkin and it broke up’ or ‘When I chopped the pumpkin it broke up’. However, such a two clause construction is not a natural way of expressing a direct causal connection, for the same reason as the English translations are not, perhaps because they separate the two events too sharply. Thus, it is difficult to argue that particular compact SVCs and chaining constructions are near functional equivalents in contemporary Kalam.
	When did compact SVCs originate? Such constructions are present in many branches of TNG and likely were present in the common ancestor of the family, which was probably spoken between six and ten millennia ago. While no one has done a systematic comparison of particular semantic patterns in compact SVCs, it is clear that there are some close correspondences across different branches of TNG, indicating certain patterns must have been stable for several millennia.

3.2 The structure of narrative SVCs
We can now take a closer look at narrative SVCs, which have a much more complex syntactic and semantic structure than compact SVCs. As their name suggests, narrative SVCs tell a short story, or parts of a story, in highly compressed form. The semantic links between events in such constructions differ from the direct causal chain and force dynamic links that characterize the event structure of many compact SVCs. The kinds of things that are mentioned in a narrative SVC, and their order, reflect conventions for telling a well-formed narrative. 
	In a well-known paper on spoken narratives in English, Labov (1973:363) identifies the following major components of narratives: 
1. Abstract. Announces the story and indicates what it is about.   
2. Orientation. Identifies the initial context, e.g. time, place and participants. 
3. Complicating action. Answers the question: What happened? 
4. Resolution. Reveals the outcome of the complicating action. 
5. Coda. Summary remark signaling that the narrative is finished.  
	Narratives may be complex, with two or more minimal narratives, or episodes, occurring within a larger story. A well-formed account of a single episode must at least describe the complicating action and the resolution, the other components being optional. Kalam narratives show similar functional parts to English narratives. The account may be spread over many clauses or be compressed into two or three clauses or even into a single clause, by the use of narrative SVCs.
Narratives reporting collecting expeditions
The distinctive features of Kalam narrative SVCs may be illustrated by examining a class of narratives that are richly represented in our corpus: successful collecting expeditions, such as getting firewood, fetching water, picking fruit, gathering leafy greens, hunting for wild mammals on the ground or in trees, and collecting pandanus leaves to make mats or for thatching.
	Collecting expeditions represent a particular sort of purposeful activity, where there is both an immediate objective and an ultimate objective. Whether carried out by humans, nut-storing squirrels, nesting sparrows or nectar-gathering bees, successful collecting expeditions have four main stages: one or more actors (i) go forth in search of something, (ii) obtain it, (iii) carry the goods to a convenient place and (iv) process or otherwise dispose of them.  
A well-formed minimal report of a successful collecting expedition in Kalam reflects this pattern. The main elements in such a report can be summarized as follows.  

		Major constituents of reports of successful collecting episodes

	1		2	3	4	5
MOVEMENT	COLLECTING	TRANSPORT	PROCESSING/	CODA
TO SCENE OF 		TO SCENE OF	DISPOSAL
COLLECTING	PROCESSING				

	Stages 1-3 each describes elements of complicating action. Stage 4 describes the resolution, telling how the goods were processed or disposed of (e.g. cooked and eaten, preserved by smoking, stored, divided up, or traded). Occasionally there is a fifth stage, that closes off the episode by saying, e.g. that the actor(s) slept or came home. For each stage, speakers can choose to say what happened in more or less detail. Thus, some episodes are given extended treatment, while others are compressed into a few clauses or even into a single clause. 
	A narrative SVC reporting a collecting episode is defined as any SVC that contains two or more of stages 1-5. Predictably, there are no recorded cases of 1+3 and 1+4; these would be ill-formed because stages 2 and 3 describe pivotal event(s) in the complicating action and cannot be omitted from a report. But the corpus contains SVCs consisting of stages 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, 2-3, 2-4, 3-4 and 4- 5. Example (1) contains stages 1-5.
	Example (15) is about gathering ñepek herbs. Clause i contains the gathering stage, the transport stage, and the first event in the processing stage, cooking. However, the second event in this stage, eating, occurs in clause ii and the coda is given in iii. 

(15)	 i.		ognap	ksen	nb	tk	d	ap	ad-l,		(stages 2-4)				sometimes	new	thus	pick	get 	come	cook-SS.PRIOR
		‘…sometimes they would gather and bring fresh ones (ñepek herbs) 	and having cooked (them),
		
	ii.	ñb-l,	(stage 4)		iii.	kn-elgp-al.		(stage 5)
		 eat.SS.PRIOR	 			sleep-PAST.HAB-PL  
			and eaten (them), they would sleep.’  (FPKF #17)

All narrative SVCs have a deeper constituent structure than compact SVCs. A maximal SVC reporting a collecting episode can be analyzed as containing five small verb phrases (VPs), each representing one stage in the episode. The boundary between each small VP is potentially a boundary between separate clauses in a chaining construction. Most often the verb series representing one stage  of a narrative SVC is a compact SVC but more complex series sometimes occur. For example, the formulaic string d ap tan + d ap yap (get come ascend + get come descend) ‘go back and forth, go up and down’, which may occur in stage 1 or stage 3, itself consists of two compact SVCs. 
At the next level up, stages 2, 3 and 4 (collecting, transport and processing) form a constituent coordinate with stage 1 (movement to the collecting site) and with stage 5 phrase (the coda, usually sleeping or return home). The verbs in stages 2-4 share the same object NP (the thing collected). They can fall under the scope of a single adverbial modifier, independently of 1. Finally the entire SVC forms a constituent, a large VP or predicate phrase, coordinate with the subject. Thus, the constituent structure of the highly recurrent lexical string in (16) is as follows: 

(16)	[[am]VP	[[[kmn	pak]VP	[d	ap] VP]VP	[ad	ñb-]VP]VP]VP]VP		go	game.mammal	kill	get come	cook	eat

	Narrative SVCs differ from compact SVCs in that the verbs need not be contiguous. Four kinds of non-verbal elements can intervene in certain positions, marking boundaries between the stages or small VPs. First, an object NP can (and often does) follow the Stage 1 verb(s) denoting movement to the scene of collecting. This can be seen in (17) and (18), as well as in (1) and (21).

(17)		.… am	kas	nb	ogok	tk	dad 	ap-l,…	(stages 1-3)	
		go	leaves	such	these	pick	carrying	come-SS:PRIOR
	‘(they) go and pick such leaves and having brought them back,…’’ 
	(KHT ch. 10, #113)

	Second, locative adjuncts can intervene. A locative adjunct to a stage 2 verb or verb series, as well as an object NP, can separate this from stage 1 material, as in (18).

(18)		Ney	am	okok	kmn-nen	gtag	tag	pak	dad	ap-l,…	
		s/he	 go	around	game-after	travel travel	kill	carrying	come-
											SS:PRIOR
‘She used to go and walk about killing and bringing back game mammals,…’ (KHT ch 10, #35) 

Alternatively, a locative adjunct to a stage 4 verb or verb series can occur after stage 3, as is the case in (19), in which the broad leaves of a spinach-like herb, bep, are gathered and put into an oven pit.

(19)	…	mj	bep 	tk	d	ap	nb	okyaη	yok-l,... 	(stages 2-4)
		leaf	spinach	pick 	get  come	place	below	throw-SS:PRIOR 
‘... having picked and brought bep leaves and thrown (them) below (into an oven pit),...’     (KHT ch. 1, #72)	

	Thirdly, an adverbial modifier can occur between the stage 1 verb(s) and the following verbs. In such cases the scope of the modifier may be over the whole SVC or just over the verb(s) that follow the modifier. In (20) (not a collecting narrative) it is probable that the speaker intended kasek ‘quickly’ to modify only the final verb. 

(20) i		…maj-wog	ogok	g	ym-e-l,
	sweet.potato-garden	these	do	plant-DS:PRIOR-3PL
	‘… after they had made these sweet potato gardens,

	ii	(kupyak)	ap	kasek	ñb-e-k			(stages 3-4)
		(rat)	come	quickly	eat-DS:PRIOR:3SG-PAST
		(the rat) came and soon ate (there).’	(KHT ch. 13, #68)

		Fourthly, a negative clitic may precede the final verb in a narrative SVC.  In compact SVCs the negative clitic must precede the entire verb series and it always has scope over the entire series. In narrative SVCs there are more options. First, the non-emphatic negator ma- can precede the entire verb series and have scope over it. Second, ma- can precede the final verb in the series but have scope over the whole series.  Third, ma-, or the emphatic negator met, can precede the final verb in the series, but have scope only over that verb, as in (6iii) above.
	Where do narrative SVCs fit in a typology of SVCs? There is no simple answer because there are many subtypes of narrative with subtly different characteristics. 
	Narrative SVCs with an uninterrupted verb series, even those containing eight or ten verb roots, are almost invariably spoken under a single intonation contour. When the verb series is discontinuous short pauses are somewhat more frequent, and are most likely to occur after a stage 1 VP that is followed by a heavy locative and/or heavy object phrase. In such cases, the likely reason for the pause is that there is new information in the non-verbal constituents and the encoder has to pay close attention to these. Compare English single-verb clauses with heavy complements or modifier phrases, which often exhibit internal pauses (Chafe 1987, 1994).

Some narrative SVCs qualify as nuclear layer constructions in Foley and Olson’s typology (the verbs are contiguous, and share all arguments and peripheral phrases). In other cases, the verbs are contiguous but the stage 1 VP appears to be joined to the other VPs at the core layer (it shares the subject but not the direct object), as is the case in (21) and (22). This type also counts as a single clause in terms of Foley and Olson’s criteria. In (21) a hunting episode is spread over two clauses. Stages 1-3 are represented in clause i while stage 4, cooking and eating, is represented in ii. The object of the stage 2 and 3 verbs occurs clause-initially in i, preceding the stage 1 verb, an indication that it is topicalized. 

(21) i.	…kmn		am 	pak	dad	ap-l,		(stages 1-3)
	 	…game:mammal	go 	kill	carrying	come-SS.PRIOR
		‘… having gone and killed and brought game mammals,
	ii.	ad	ñb-l	katp	seη	ognl,....	(stage 4)
		cook	eat-SS.PRIOR	house	old:site	those
		they cooked and ate them at those old house sites,...’ (KHT Intro, #8)

In (22) the object NP is omitted, having been established earlier in the narrative.

(22) 	Bin  	pataj	ogok	 am	yg 	pak	dad	ap-elgp-al...	(stages 1-3)
	woman	young	these	go	dig  	kill	carrying	come-PAST.HAB-3PL
‘Young women used to go and dig up and kill and bring back (these bush rats)…’   (KHT ch. 13, #29)

In a small minority of narrative SVCs, one VP appears to be joined to the rest at the peripheral layer (cases where the scope of a locative adjunct or an adverbial modifier, or a negator is restricted to just one of the VPs), and this type Foley and Olson would treat as a two clauses. However, rather than dichotomising, I think it makes more sense to see different constructions as occupying different points on a continuum or scale, as being more or less like prototypical clauses.

3.3. How and why did narrative SVCs develop?
There can be little doubt that narrative SVCs developed by clause union, as stripped down paraphrases of clause chains. Syntactically and semantically, the closest relatives of narrative SVCs are same subject clause-chaining constructions, in which the speaker uses a string of medial verbs to report a sequence of acts performed by the same actor. Comment has already been made on the close parallels between information packed into the separate stages, or little VPs, of a narrative SVC and information packed into separate clauses of same subject chaining constructions.
		Same subject (or same topic) clause chaining is extremely widespread across subgroups of TNG languages (Roberts 1997) and was presumably present in the common ancestor of the family. However, it seems that while many TNG languages have narrative SVCs of a sort, few show the degree of elaboration found in Kalam and its close relative, Kobon (Davies 1981), and presumably this elaboration was an innovation of the common ancestor of this subgroup. It seems that certain formal characteristics of the language ancestral to Kalam and Kobon provided conditions favorable to the compression of elaborate verb series into a clause-like construction. One such characteristic is that zero anaphora was then, as now, the norm for subjects and objects, allowing verb roots to be juxtaposed. A second is that the most common verb roots were short, mostly monosyllabic, and some consisted of a consonant alone, so that (as was noted earlier) a sequence of eight verb stems might occupy just six syllables. 
But the question remains: Why would speakers wish to cram several discrete stages of a narrative into a single clause? What is to be gained by such compression?
There appear to be two kinds of gains, both having to do with packaging information for a fast ride. The first has to do with choices in way of telling a story, in choosing how much detail to provide. Same actor chaining constructions are preferred when speakers want to individuate particular events in a narrative, whether merely to emphasize the temporal discreteness of the stages, or to elaborate on details. Narrative SVCs are preferred when speakers do not want to individuate the stages. In narrative SVCs individual events in the sequence are mentioned but in the most minimal way, with little or no use of what Labov (1973) calls evaluative devices – such as voice modulations, adverbial intensifiers and descriptive phrases – to add detail and drama to the bare bones of the reported actions. Of course, speakers narrating a particular episode can use a mixture of strategies, using single verb clauses for some stages and narrative SVCs for others.
		The second gain, related to the first, is in economy of processing. The predicate phrase in a narrative SVCs is represented by speech formulas whose lexical content is stored in the long-term memory and which can be retrieved as an automatic chain. Significantly a minority of same subject clause-chaining sequences correspond, unit for unit, to narrative SVCs: those that conform to the formula for a well-formed minimal narrative. And it is very probable that these are also the mostly frequently same subject clause chains.  
		One measure of the rigidity of narrative SVCs is the fact that, speakers often recount a whole episode, with all its sub-events, even when the main point being made relates to just one sub-event in the sequence. This apparent transgression of the Gricean principle of economy can be seen both in narrative SVCs and in clause chaining constructions. Consider (23):

(23)	i.	As	nb-ak	yg	pak	d	ap	ñb-l,	(stages 2-4)
		small.mammal	like-this	dig	kill	get	come 	eat-SS.PRIOR
‘After digging up killing bringing (home) and eating this kind of animal,
	ii.	b	mnek		wog	ksen 	ma-a-b-al.
		man	next.day	garden	new	not-go-PERF-3PL 
		men don’t go into newly planted gardens for the next few days.’

It is only the act of killing this kind of animal that makes a man ritually dangerous to crops. The other four sub-events represented in clause i (the mode of capture, transport, cooking and eating of the animal) are not strictly relevant to the point the narrator is making. Thus, an idiomatic English translation would simply say ‘After killing this kind of animal, men don’t enter newly planted gardens...’ 
In such cases, why do speakers bother to mention the superfluous sub-events? There appear to be two possible answers: (i) because convention requires it –without these details the event report would seem incomplete, (ii) because the formula for the whole event sequence is stored in the long term memory and it is just as easy, or easier to retrieve the whole sequence than to pick out the salient sub-event.
But a construction can be formulaic and still be multi-clausal. The sole advantage of using a one clause formula over a two or three clause formula to express the same information appears to be that the former takes less time and can more easily be uttered under a single intonation contour. This advantage was evidently enough for the ancestors of the Kalam and Kobon to develop narrative SVCs.  
It seems, then, that the clause frame is a natural target for encoders. While the norm is for clauses to contain just a single lexical verb, speakers will find ways and means of compressing frequently used multiclause expressions into a single clause construction. In this respect Kalam narrative SVCs are testament to human ingenuity and to the power of ‘chunking’. They show that, given the right phonological, semantic and syntactic preconditions, it is possible to stretch a clause structure to accommodate eight or ten verbs. But such complex expressions can be uttered as fluent units only because they are learnt as formulae, and do not need to be constructed bit by bit. 

4.  Conclusion: Kalam and the cycle of syntacticization
We have compared various Kalam constructions that depict event sequences, with an eye to their functional and diachronic relationships. Is there evidence here for the thesis that loose, paratactic structures develop into tighter syntactic structures and then into lexicalized or grammaticalized units? The Kalam material did not include strictly paratactic discourse so it does not bear on this part of the thesis. However it did include same subject clause-chaining constructions, two kinds of lexical SVCs, and grammaticalized SVCs. 
	The short answer is that there is much in the Kalam material that is consistent with the thesis that, over, time, speakers find ways and means of compressing highly recurrent multi-clause expressions into single clause expressions, that particular verb series come to have the status of lexical items and that some verbs take on grammatical functions. Jonathan Lane, whose recent book presents the most thorough account of Kalam SVCs, has neatly summed up the diachronic tendencies exhibited by these constructions. I can do no better than cite his remarks:

Certain sequences of events tend to be coded in SVCs, in large part to marry speed of articulation with the requirements of Kalam discourse. Verb order is initially iconic with the order of events coded, recapitulating the most typical patterns of interclausal discourse. Once events get coded in SVCs, iconicity of another kind takes over. The close association of events coded by the verbs is reinforced by, among other things, the physical closeness of the stems themselves. Contiguity of stems, and the absence of morphological markers within SVCs, allows reinterpretation of the relation between stems… From coding independent events they move to being dependent on each other in some way. One manifestation of this is for the stems to become part of a larger lexical unit …. This has happened with resultative compounds, and with complex verbs of motion. The end point of this process is phonological fusion into a single word. Alternately, one stem can end up modifying the other.  Essentially, one stem will begin to act as a grammatical marker.  In Kalam SVCs, this correlates highly with SVC-final position. Hence discourse can be seen as being sucked inexorably into SVCs, and, through SVCs, into the lexicon or into the grammatical system. 
(Lane 2007:135)

NOTES
1. I am grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of Auckland and the University of Papua New Guinea for supporting my fieldwork on Kalam, in various spells between 1963 and 1993.

2. A few years later I read another mind-stretching book, On Understanding Grammar, by Tom Givón (1979), where, among other things, he explored the implications of viewing grammar as a processing strategy. While Givón argued that the structure of languages is shaped by many other forces beyond the need to describe events, he acknowledged plays a key role in language played by the clause, as a level that deals with the specification of events and states.

3. Among the linguists who in the 1970s were concerned with several of these issues were Dwight Bolinger, Wallace Chafe, Tom Givón, Koenraad Kuiper, Pim Levelt and Diana Van Lancker. The field has broadened greatly in more recent times, as the discussion in Chafe (1994) and Wray (2003) indicates. 

4. There is a large literature on the event structure of verbs, much of it treating English, and to a lesser extent, Romance and Germanic languages, and Hebrew. See, for example, Bohnemeyer et al. 2007, Croft 1990, Dowty 1979, Jackendoff 1990, Levin and Rapaport-Hovav 1995, 1996, Parsons 1990 and Talmy 2000. For a debate about event structure in Kalam see Givón (1990, 1991) and Pawley (1987, in press b).

5. Kalam is spoken by about 20,000 people living around the junction of the Bismarck and Schrader Ranges, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. There are two main dialects, Etp and Ti, which show considerable differences in morphological forms and lexicon. Examples cited here are from the Ti dialect as spoken at Gobnem in the Upper Kaironk Valley. The main source of examples cited here is an extensive collection of tape-recordings and texts on Kalam traditional knowledge and use of animals and plants in the Ti dialect by Ian Saem Majnep and his collaborators, chiefly Majnep and Bulmer (1983, 1990, n.d.) and Majnep and Pawley (n.d.). 
There is a fairly extensive literature on Kalam linguistics. The most detailed study of serial verb constructions is Lane (2007), but see also Givón (1990, 1991), Pawley (in press a, b), Pawley and Lane (1998). Other works on Kalam grammar and lexicon include Pawley (1966, 1987, 1993, in press b), Pawley et al. (2000), and Pawley and Bulmer (2003).

6. The following abbreviations are used in glossing Kalam examples and in identifying sources of texts. 

DS		different Subject (from following verb)
DUR	durative
FPKF	Some food plants of our Kalam forest (Majnep and Bulmer 1983)
FUT	future 
IMP	imperative
KHT	Kalam hunting traditions (Majnep and Bulmer 1990)
KPL	Kalam plant lore (Majnep and Pawley. n.d.)
Obj	object (case)
PL		plural
PAST	remote past (yesterday or earlier)
PERF	perfect (denotes present perfect, present habitual and today’s past)
PASTHAB	past habitual
PRIOR	prior to (the event denoted by following verb)
PRESPROG	present progressive
SG		singular
SS		same subject (as following verb)
VP		verb phrase
1,2 3	1st, 2nd, 3rd person 
–		morpheme boundary within a phonological word
=		clitic boundary within a phonological word 

7. Ross (1975) referred to this integrative process as ‘clause-crunching’ and discussed a number of examples from English. There is a considerable literature on various kinds of clause-crunching, Givon (1980) on types of clausal complements and Alsina et al. (1997) on types of complex predicates being just two examples. 

8. Although extensive research on the role of hesitation phenomena in speech production was carried out by experimental psychologists in the 1950s, 60 and early 70s (parts of it reviewed in Goldman-Eisler 1968 and Rochester 1973), Syder and I were unable to find that in that literature any proposals similar to the one-clause-at-a-time hypothesis. 

9. In most respects Kalam’s morphological and syntactic patterns are typical of the Trans New Guinea (TNG) family. However, it allows more elaborate serial verb constructions than most TNG languages. 

10. There are other kinds of non-canonical SVCs, which will not be discussed here. Some of these are described in Lane (2007) and Pawley (in press a).  

11. The distinction between compact or narrative SVCs is usually clear but there are some cases that have claims to be treated as both. The distinction is similar to (though not identical to) that made between ‘component serialization’ and ‘narrative serialization by van Staden and Reesink (in press). Narrative SCVs very like those of Kalam appear in Kalam’s closest relative, Kobon (Davies 1981). Broadly similar constructions appear in some other New Guinea languages (e.g. Bruce 1988, Heeschen 2001, Farr 1999). This kind of SVC has variously been called condensed narrative (Heeschen 2001), narrative (van Staden and Reesink in press), episodic (Farr 1999, Pawley 1987) and multi-scene (Lane 2007, Pawley and Lane 1998).  

12. It can be argued that one function of narrative SVCs is to make up for Kalam’s lack of verbs that represent scripted event sequences, such as ‘hunt’, ‘gather’, ‘fetch’, etc. However, the event structure of some SVCs is considerably more complex than any single verb in English.

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