This chapter provides a grammatical sketch of Yimas, a morphologically highly complex polysynthetic language spoken in the Sepik basin region of the northern swampy lowlands of Papua New Guinea. The chapter discusses the extensively elaborated word structure of Yimas and the non-configurational property of its clauses, which lack the familiar syntactic category of phrases. Particular emphasis is placed on the system of agreement on the two principal word classes of the language, nouns and verbs, transitivity and macrorole assignment, alignment, clause linkage and nominalizations.

This chapter offers an in-depth treatment of clause linkage and complex sentences in RRG. First, it discusses and exemplifies each nexus–juncture type, adducing evidence from a wide range of languages. Then, it introduces the notion of syntactic and semantic cohesiveness in clause linkage and makes relevant generalizations and predictions.

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.