The morphological ordering relationships among a set of valence-changing suffixes found throughout the Bantu family have been of theoretical interest in a number of synchronic studies of the daughter languages. However, few attempts have yet been made to reconstruct the principles governing their ordering in the parent language. Based on a survey of over thirty Bantu languages, this paper proposes a reconstruction wherein the order of suffixes marking causativization and applicativization was fixed in Proto-Bantu. This reconstruction runs counter to approaches to morphosyntax where semantic scope is taken to determine the order of morphemes but is consistent with templatic approaches to morpheme ordering in the Bantu family.

Chechen exhibits three major strategies for the combination of clauses: coordination, chaining, and subordination. The major formal characteristics of these three traditional categories of clause linking are discussed with reference to their basic syntax and semantics as well as to more particular syntactic characteristics, including constituent order and behaviour with respect to negation and wh-questions. In addition, these clause combining strategies of Chechen are classified with respect to Foley and Van Valin’s (1984) typology of clause linkage. A particularly useful result of this classification is that it permits a straightforward characterization of the use of the preverbal conjunctive enclitic ’a as a marker of cosubordination.

Purpose: To contribute to the establishment of a novel approach to language documentation that includes bilingual and multilingual speech data. This approach would open this domain of study to work by specialists of bilingualism and multilingualism. Approach: Within language documentation, the approach adopted in this paper exemplifies the “contemporary communicative ecology” mode of documentation. This radically differs from the “ancestral-code” mode of documentation that characterizes most language documentation corpora. Within the context of multilingualism studies, this paper advocates for the inclusion of a strong ethnographic component to research on multilingualism. Data and Analysis: The data presented comes from a context characterized by small-scale multilingualism, and the analyses provided are by and large focused on uncovering aspects of local metapragmatics. Conclusions: Conducting language documentation in contexts of small-scale multilingualism requires that the adequacy of a corpus is assessed with regard to sociolinguistic, rather than only structural linguistic, requirements. The notion of sociolinguistic adequacy is discussed in detail in analytical terms and illustrated through an example taken from ongoing research led by the authors. Originality: To date, there are no existing publications reviewing in the detail provided here how the documentation of multilingual speech in contexts of small-scale multilingualism should be structured. The contribution is highly original, in particular, for its theoretical grounding of the proposed approach. Significance/Implications: This article can serve as a reference for those interested in methodological and theoretical concerns relating to the practice of language documentation in contexts of small-scale multilingualism across the world. It may also help clarify ways for sociolinguists to engage more closely with work on language documentation, a domain that has thus far remained primarily informed by structural linguistic approaches.

The last decade has seen increasing attention paid to questions of grammatical complexity, in particular regarding the extent to which some languages can be said to be more ‘complex’ than others, whether globally or with respect to particular subsystems. Creoles have featured prominently in these debates, with various authors arguing that they are particularly simple when set against non-creoles, with an apparent lack of overt morphology in creoles often cited as one of the ways in which their grammars are especially simplified. This paper makes two contributions to this discussion. First, it develops metrics of grammatical complexity that derive directly from a well-known model of creole development, thus providing an explicit link between the sociohistorical circumstances in which creoles formed and grammatical outcomes. Second, it applies these metrics to the newly published dataset from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, setting this data against that from the well-known World Atlas of Language Structures, allowing for a more comprehensive and rigorous quantitative comparison of complexity in contact and non-contact languages than has previously been possible. It will be seen that there is good evidence that contact languages are simplified overall with respect to a class of complexities labelled paradigmatic here but that this general conclusion nevertheless masks significant underlying variation among them.