In this talk, I address how the "one intonation unit" constraint interacts with the formal realisation of serial verb constructions and clause-chaining, as well as processes of grammaticalisation. The effects of discourse, verbal meaning, and weakening of prosodic boundaries are discussed.
In this talk, we will discuss associations between syntactic units and silent pauses in a sample of diverse languages. The relation between pausing and syntactic boundaries has been rarely tested outside of major world languages, with the majority of studies performed in lab conditions utilising reading tasks and/or controlled stimuli. This work represents a first step in the wider testing of the purported correlation of pause length and syntactic unithood using naturalistic data.