Serial verbs in Wambaya

Abstract

Australian languages are traditionally not thought of as having serial verb constructions (although cf. Goddard 1988; Wilkins 1988), and are therefore rarely discussed in the extensive typological and theoretical literature on verb serialization. However, in recent work Laughren (2009, 2012) has reported on the existence of serial verb constructions in Waanyi, a non–Pama-Nyungan language of northern Australia. In this paper I show that serial verb constructions are also present in Wambaya, another non–Pama-Nyungan language which shares some areal and lexical similarities with Waanyi. I show that the serial verbs in Wambaya exhibit many of the key morphosyntactic and semantic properties descr..