The term precedence relations is commonly used to refer to linear structural relations among words or phrases of different categories. Precedence relations, in fact, also hold among words or phrases of the same categorial status. The order of the verb phrases in complex multi-verbal predicate constructions, such as serial verb constructions (SVCs), is a case in point. Serial verb constructions have been observed in a variety of languages, including the languages of South-East Asia and West Africa. This paper examines the order of verbs or verb phrases within serial verb constructions in Cantonese and that in Dagaare, a language found in northwestern Ghana. The paper adopts an optimality-theoretic approach, comparing the ranking of the constraints that are at play in bringing about the verb order in the SVCs of each of the two languages. Four constraints are of particular relevance to the analysis. They are (i) the Principle of Temporal Precedence (PTP) (Bodomo 1997); (ii) NEW-L (Choi 2001); (iii) NEW-R (Choi 2001); and (iv) *RED(UNDANT). The ranking of these constraints for Cantonese and Dagaare are summarized below: