This chapter provides a grammatical overview of Avatime, a Niger-Congo language spoken in the south-east of Ghana. The first part surveys lexical categories (parts of speech and major Aktionsart classes of predicates), syntactic structure (clause structure, grammatical operators, nominal structure, and adpositional structure), and focus structure, while the second part is devoted to describing and illustrating the rich variety of serial verb constructions in Avatime, identifying three types of juncture–nexus (nuclear cosubordination, core coordination, and core cosubordination), and investigating how the correspondences of these juncture–nexus relations and their semantic functions fit into the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy.

This chapter describes the basic syntax of the Amele (Papuan) language from a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) perspective. Typologically, Amele has head-last syntax and is head-marking. Nominative-accusative agreement is suffixed to the verb stem and up to four arguments can be marked on the verb. There are only two major lexical categories, nouns and verbs, with very little overlap between these categories. Alternative undergoer selection may be made for ditransitive verbs. There is no passive construction in the language and the only choice for privileged syntactic argument (PSA) is [S, AT]. Focus may be expressed morphologically and by incorporation of modifier elements into the verb word. The language-specific topics featured are serial verb constructions and switch-reference (SR). SR applies to clauses in both coordinate and (some) embedded constructions. It is judged to be a local syntactic device for monitoring the referentiality of PSA arguments between adjacent clauses as to whether they have identical or non-identical reference.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the strategies used in mainland Southeast Asian languages for making verbal predications in the core of clauses. There is an overview of verbal marking including patterns of negation, aspect, and modality. An important feature of the area’s languages is the heavy reliance on serial verb constructions (or multi-verb constructions) for packaging information in clauses and sentences. The chapter surveys various sub-categories of multi-verb construction, including depictive/adverbial constructions and complementation strategies. The chapter closes with a section on valency-changing strategies, including syntactic causatives, reflexives, and reciprocals.