Clause linking in Japhug

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed description of clause linking in Japhug, based on a corpus of traditional narratives and conversations. It follows the methodology used in Dixon and Aikhenvald’s (2009) collective book on this topic, to ease crosslinguistic comparisons. Although Japhug has a very rich system of converbs, there is not a single meaning that requires a non-finite form: all subtypes of clause linking can be expressed exclusively with finite verb forms, and these indeed predominate in our corpus.