tiger bit Zhang to death", where Zhang is understood as the direct object of yǎo ("bite") but as the subject of sǐ ("die"). In the equivalent construction in Hindi, the one who dies would be the tiger, not Zhang. (See Chinese grammar for more.) In the following example from Maonan, a language spoken in southwestern China, up to ten verbs co-occur in a sentence coding a single event without any linking words, coordinating conjunctions or any other markings: Examples with intervening elements between verbs In some languages that have verb serialization, the verbs must appear consecutively with nothing intervening. In other languages, however, it is possible for arguments, normally the object of one of the verbs, to come in between the serialized verbs. The resulting construction is a sequence of verb phrases rather than of plain verbs. The following example is from the Nigerian Yoruba: The object of the first verb intervenes between the verbs, resulting in two consecutive verb phrases, the first meaning "took the book", the second "came". As before, the subject ("he" in this case) is understood to apply to both verbs. The combined action of taking the book and coming can be translated as "bringing" the book. A serial verb construction may be used to introduce an actant ("money" in the following example, from Akan of West Africa): In Japanese also, strings of verb phrases can be created, often denoting events that are related causally or in time. Such strings may be translated into English by using "and", "while", "(in order) to" or other connectives, but some may have a more compact translation, as in the following example (from Hayao Miyazaki's Mononoke Hime) in which the actions of "following" and "coming" are simultaneous: The following sentence from Mandarin Chinese can be considered to contain four verb phrases in sequence: In Chinese, however, there is often no clear distinction between serial verb phrases and prepositional phrases. The first three "verbs" in the above sentence may alternatively be regarded as prepositions (this applies particularly to words like cóng which do not normally appear as independent verbs). Words used in that way in Chinese and in some other languages are commonly referred to as coverbs. Contrast with compound verbs A distinction is sometimes made between serial verbs and compound verbs (also known as complex predicates). In a compound verb, the first element (verb or noun) generally carries most of