Serial Verbs in Oceanic A Descriptive Typology

This book describes the diversity of serial verb constructions within Oceanic languages. Serial verb constructions are sequences of verbs placed one after another to express meanings which in other languages are typically expressed by means of single verbs. It has long been established that West African, Southeast Asian and Papuan languages are serializing languages, but the construction has only comparatively recently been recognized in Oceanic languages, which belong to a very large sub-group of the Austronesian family.

Terry Crowley is Associate Professor in the Department of General and Applied Linguistics at the University of Waikato. He has researched languages in Vanuatu for 25 years, and has written about the Paamese and Erromangan languages. He has produced a dictionary of Bislama, and a detailed account of its historical development.