Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

326 Ulrike Mosel
5 Four types of syntactic changes
The syntactic changes made by the editors can be grouped into four types of
change:
1. Linkage of paratactic clauses (§ 5.1)
1.1. linkage by cross-clausal dependency without embedding (chained Tail-
Head linkage, adjoined adverbial clauses)
1.2. integration by embedding (relative clause constructions)
1.3. interlacing by raising in complement constructions
2. Compression of two paratactic clauses into one clause (§ 5.2) by
2.1. serial verb constructions
2.2. nominalisations
2.3. ditransitive constructions
3. Decompression: resolution of complex constructions into paratactic constructions
(§ 5.3)
4. Elaboration: addition of words, phrases, clauses (§ 5.4)
The description of clause linkage (§ 5.1) and compression (§ 5.2) follows to
some extent Lehmann’s typology of clause linkage (Lehmann 1985). While
§ 5.1 describes how a sequence of two independent clauses is changed into a
complex sentence, § 5.2 shows three kinds of syntactic change that merge two
paratactic clauses into a single clause. The third type of change described in
§ 5.3 is the opposite of the others as it resolves complex sentences into a sequence
of paratactic clauses. This shows that the changes made by editors are
not unidirectional from simple to more complex constructions. I do not know
why the editors made these changes because I was afraid that any questions
about their style of writing could be misunderstood as criticism and intimidate
them. The last type of change described here is elaboration which often results
in one of the other syntactic changes.
5.1 Linkage of paratactic clauses
Paratactic clauses are either joined by juxtaposition or by the conjunctions me
‘and’ or re ‘and then, so that, in order to’.
5.1.1 Cross-clausal dependency without embedding: Tail-Head constructions
So-called Tail-Head Linkage is widely attested in Oceanic and Papuan languages
(Dixon 1988: 307, Mosel 1984: 124, Thieberger 2006: 327 f., Vries 2005).