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.

Many stretches of discourse typically consist of a sequence of distinct events; but many referents recur across events. The tracking of referents contributes to discourse cohesion but is also an element of complex sentence constructions. The most likely (but not necessarily the only) referents to be tracked are the subject referents of the clauses in a complex sentence construction. Hence, the primary distinction in reference tracking constructions is between same-subject (SS) and different-subject (DS) constructions. Balanced constructions may use the standard discourse reference strategy (Chapter 3), or the SS strategy may use a zero subject strategy not used for general discourse reference (conditional discourse reference). Reference tracking constructions may be distinguished such that the SS construction is deranked and the DS construction is balanced (conditional deranking), or both SS and DS constructions are deranked (absolute deranking). If both SS and DS constructions are deranked, but systematically differentiated, then the absolute deranking system is a switch-reference system.