Serial verbs in Australian Indigenous languages

Australian languages are not typically thought of as serializing languages, although recent research has led to serial verbs being reported for a few of them. In this paper we provide the first comprehensive study of serial verb constructions across Australian languages, resulting from a survey of 50 Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages. We find that serial verb constructions are more prevalent amongst these languages than previous research suggests. We discuss the distribution of serial verb constructions in both Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages, as well as identifying the different semantic types of serial verbs which are found in Australian languages. We then compare the Australian constructions with the broader cross-linguistic literature on serial verbs and find that serial verbs in Australian languages display some unusual features not reported elsewhere in the typological literature on serial verbs, including anti-iconic orderings, additional matching transitivity requirements and languages without motion serial verbs, despite having other types of serial verbs.