The History of Tense/Aspect/Mood/Voice in the Mayan Verbal Complex
The History of Tense/Aspect/Mood/Voice in the Mayan Verbal Complex

Author: John S. Robertson

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-08-19

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0292769601

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Mayan civilization, renowned for its mathematics, writing, architecture, religion, calendrics, and agriculture, fascinates scholars and a wide lay public as archaeology and glyphic decipherment reveal more of its secrets. In this pathfinding study of the Mayan language family, John S. Robertson explores major changes that have occurred in the core of Mayan grammar from the earliest, reconstructed ancestral language down through the colonial languages to the modern languages that are spoken today. Building on groundwork already laid in phonological studies and in the study of the pronominal system, Robertson's examination of tense/ aspect/ mood/voice is the next logical step in the general linguistic study of Mayan. Robertson offers careful consideration of all the major subgroups of Mayan, from Yucatecan to Quichean, as they are spoken today. He also draws extensively on colonial documents assembled by bilingual Spanish-Mayan speaking clerics. These documents provide a check on the accuracy of both the reconstructed ancient language, Common Mayan, and the theoretical evolution of the modern languages from this ancestor. The study will also be of value to students of the Maya glyphs, since it discusses the grammatical system that most probably underlies the glyphic representations. Beyond its obvious interest for Mayan linguistics, the study proposes a theory of language change that will be important for all students of comparative linguistics. Robertson's work sets forth the basic, universal assumptions that provide for an appropriate description of the grammatical systems of all languages. It will be a significant reference for future researchers.

Maya Glyphs
Maya Glyphs

Author: Linda Schele

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2013-12-18

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0292736398

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The key to the study of the language and history of the Classic Maya (A.D. 293–900) is the verb. Maya Glyphs: The Verbs is a comprehensive study of the verb morphology and syntax of the Maya writing system. Linda Schele's summary of methodology makes available in a single place many important discoveries and approaches to the Maya language. Hers is the first sourcebook to include so broad a range of dates and to identify for the first time so many Maya rulers and events. The admirably lucid text provides an excellent introduction to Maya hieroglyphics for the beginner, and, for the experienced Mayanist, it offers a fascinating explanation of methodology, including paraphrasing, and important information about syntactical structures, special verbal constructions, and literary conventions. Schele's extensive catalog of known verbal phrases is useful for a variety of purposes. Because it is organized according to verbal affix patterns, it provides the only available source for the distribution of such patterns in the writing system. At the same time it registers the date of each event, its agent and patient (if recorded), the dedication date of the monument on which the glyphs occur, and a pictorial illustration, rather than a T-number transcription, of each example. Extensive notes treating problems of dating, interpretation, and dynastic information contain theories about the meaning and function of the events recorded in the Maya inscriptions.

Language Contact, Inherited Similarity and Social Difference
Language Contact, Inherited Similarity and Social Difference

Author: Danny Law

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-06-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9027270473

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This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.

Development of Nominal Inflection in First Language Acquisition
Development of Nominal Inflection in First Language Acquisition

Author: Ursula Stephany

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 3110188406

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The crosslinguistic studies of the early developmental stages of number, case, and gender in twelve typologically different languages with eight genetic affiliations follow a functional-constructivist approach. Some issues addressed are mean size of paradigms, percentage of base forms, and productivity. One of the main findings is that the typological characteristics of the language acquired influence the process of inflectional development.

Tzotzil Clause Structure
Tzotzil Clause Structure

Author: J. Aissen

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9400937415

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xv NOTES ON THE ORTHOGRAPHY AND CITATIONS xxi LIST OF ABBREVIA TIONS XXIIl CHAPTER 1: GRAMMATICAL NOTES 1 1. Introduction 1 2. Basics 1 3. Major Lexical Classes 2 3. 1. V 3 3. 2. N 3 3. 3. A 5 3. 3. 1. Quantifiers 6 3. 3. 2. Existentials and Locatives 6 4. Minor Lexical Classes 7 4. 1. Clitics 7 4. 1. 1. Clause-proclitic 7 4. 1. 2. S-enclitic 8 4. 1. 3. V-enclitic 8 4. 1. 4. Clause-second 9 4. 2. Directionals 9 4. 3. Particles 11 5. Flagging 11 6. Word Order 12 7. Construction Survey 12 7. 1. Negation 12 13 7. 2. Questions 7. 3. Complement Clauses 14 16 7. 4. Motion cum Purpose 17 7. 5. Topics 7. 6. Prepredicate Position 18 19 Notes CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL SKETCH 20 20 1. Arcs vii Vlll T ABLE OF CONTENTS 1. 1. Sets of Grammatical Relations 22 1. 2. Stratum 24 Ergative and Absolutive 1. 3. 25 1. 4. 25 Formal Connections between Arcs 2. Sponsor and Erase 26 2. 1. Successors 26 2. 2. Replacers 28 2. 3. Self-Sponsor and Self-Erase 30 3. Ancestral Relations 31 4. Pair Networks 31 Resolution of Overlapping Arcs 32 5. 6. Coordinate Determination 33 7. Rules and Laws 35 8. Word Order 36 9. APG Versions of RG Laws 36 9. 1. Stratal Uniqueness Law 36 9. 2. Chomeur Law and Motivated Chomage Law 36 Relational Succession Law and Host Limitation Law 9. 3.

Agreement and Its Failures
Agreement and Its Failures

Author: Omer Preminger

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2014-09-12

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0262526174

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A novel proposal regarding predicate-argument agreement that combines detailed empirical investigation with rigorous theoretical discussion. In this book, Omer Preminger investigates how the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement is enforced by the grammar. Preminger argues that an empirically adequate theory of predicate-argument agreement requires recourse to an operation, whose obligatoriness is a grammatical primitive not reducible to representational properties, but whose successful culmination is not enforced by the grammar. Preminger's argument counters contemporary approaches that find the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement enforced through representational means. The most prominent of these is Chomsky's “interpretability”-based proposal, in which the obligatoriness of predicate-argument agreement is enforced through derivational time bombs. Preminger presents an empirical argument against contemporary approaches that seek to derive the obligatory nature of predicate-argument agreement exclusively from derivational time bombs. He offers instead an alternative account based on the notion of obligatory operations better suited to the facts. The crucial data involves utterances that inescapably involve attempted-but-failed agreement and are nonetheless fully grammatical. Preminger combines a detailed empirical investigation of agreement phenomena in the Kichean (Mayan) languages, Zulu (Bantu), Basque, Icelandic, and French with an extensive and rigorous theoretical exploration of the far-reaching consequences of these data. The result is a novel proposal that has profound implications for the formalism that the theory of grammar uses to derive obligatory processes and properties.