Describes the phonological development of the Mixe-Zoquean (MZ) language and constructs a morphology for the MZ proto-language, for decipherers of Epi-Olmec writing and students of Mesoamerican prehistory. A section on comparative phonology outlines language classification and looks at developments in Mixean and Zoquean languages. The bulk of the book offers 2,218 cognate sets. Includes Spanish-MZ and English-Spanish word indices, but no subject index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The handbook provides a thorough survey of the languages pertaining to the Mesoamerican culture region, including a wealth of new research on synchronic structures and historical linguistics of lesser known languages, also including sign languages. The volume moreover features overviews of recent research on topics such as language acquisition and the expression of spatial orientation across languages of the region.
This book provides a clear and comprehensive description of the Ocotepec/Tapalapa variant of Chiapas Zoque. Zoque is one of the two major branches of the Mixe-Zoquean language family, spoken in the southern part of Mexico. Until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century the Mixe-Zoquean languages covered a large area from Veracruz on the Gulf coast to the border of Guatemala and the Pacific coast. Inscriptions in Zoque from the first half of the first millennium AD are the oldest known linguistic documents in Mesoamerica.The Zoquean area once included the entire heartland of the Olmecs, who almost certainly spoke a proto-Zoquean or proto-Mixe-Zoquean language. The Zoques are thus the most likely direct descendents of the oldest known civilization of Mexico. As a result of a long history of close contact, Zoque and Mayan share areal features, and there are lexical borrowings in both directions, but genetically and typologically they are clearly distinct. The Zoque-speaking area has shrunk considerably since pre-colonial times. In 1982 an eruption from the volcano Chichonal destroyed a central part of the Zoque core area and caused a mass migration of Zoque speakers to parts of Mexico where Spanish is the dominant language. This record of an unusual and critically endangered language will be a vital resource for linguists of all theoretical persuasions.
This work is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This detailed description and analysis includes an overview of the language and its family, its typological features and its phonology. The grammar also provides an overview of the word classes, including verbs, nouns, relational nouns/postpositions, adjectives, adverbs, numbers, and formative types. The bulk of this grammar is devoted to the morphosyntax of Sierra Popoluca, including nouns and nominal morphology, verbs and verbal morphology, and the mechanisms for expressing tense, aspect, mood, and modality. An agglutinating, polysynthetic, head-marking language with ergative-absolutive alignment and sensitivity to animacy and saliency hierarchies, Sierra Popoluca has a number of strategies to form complex predicates, which include verb serialization, noun incorporation, and dependent verb constructions. These complex predicate formation strategies and sentence-level syntax are also described here. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. There is no competing work that provides the breadth and depth of coverage of the Sierra Popoluca grammar.
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.
The volume presents new insights into two basic theoretical issues hotly debated in recent work on grammaticalization and language contact: grammatical replication and grammatical borrowability. The key issues are: How can grammatical replication be distinguished from other, superficially similar processes of contact-induced linguistic change, and under what conditions does it take place? Are there grammatical morphemes or constructions that are more easily borrowed than others, and how can language contact account for areal biases in the borrowing (vs. calquing) of grammatical formatives? The book is a major contribution to the ongoing theoretical discussion concerning the relationship between grammaticalization and language contact on a broad empirical basis.
This volume considers the significance of stone monuments in Preclassic Mesoamerica. By placing sculptures in their cultural, historical, social, political, religious, and cognitive contexts, the seventeen contributors utilize archaeological and art historical methods to understand the origins, growth, and spread of civilization in Middle America.
This volume presents fifteen original papers dealing with various aspects of causative constructions ranging from morphology to semantics with emphasis on language data from Central and South America. Informed by a better understanding of how different constructions are positioned both synchronically (e.g., on a semantic map) and diachronically (e.g., through grammaticalization processes), the volume affords a comprehensive up-to-date perspective on the perennial issues in the grammar of causation such as the distribution of competing causative morphemes, the meaning distinctions among them, and the overall form-meaning correlation. Morphosyntactic interactions of causatives with other phenomena such as incorporation and applicativization receive focused attention as such basic issues as the semantic distinction between direct and indirect causation and the typology of causative constructions.
"The Emergence of Distinctive Features will be of essential interest to phonologists and typologists, as well as to syntacticians, cognitive scientists, and scholars outside linguistics interested in the nature of language and its acquisition."--BOOK JACKET.
Thousands of years ago, people settled in the part of the world called Mesoamerica. This region consists of southern Mexico and most of Central America as it stretches between what is now called the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Although many different countries now exist within this space, it was the original home to just one civilisation: the Olmec. As time advanced, other well-known groups became dominant in the area. These were primarily the Aztecs and the Mayan. All these early civilizations that existed from approximately 1200 BCE to 900 CE were steeped with culture, tradition, commerce, and conflict. They also offer many mysteries and enigmas to modern understanding. These are the things that make people wonder about how the civilisations arose, gained such power, and why they disappeared. Travel back in time to the first days to discover the questions that still exist in the minds of archaeologists, historians, and others who strive to understand the ancient mysteries of Mesoamerica.
