Author : Eladio Mateo Toledo
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 22,80 MB
Release : 2022-10-17
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9004289984
In this volume, Eladio Mateo Toledo provides a description and analysis of resultatives, end-states, monitoring constructions, ditransitives, causatives, and directional constructions. Although causatives and directionals are explored in Mayan languages, this is the first coherent account of a series complex predicates in a Mayan language.
Author : Søren Wichmann
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 820 pages
File Size : 29,56 MB
Release : 2024-12-16
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3110421763
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.
Author : Judith Aissen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 902 pages
File Size : 15,11 MB
Release : 2017-05-12
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 1351754793
The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.
Author : Pedro Mateo Pedro
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 41,30 MB
Release : 2015-08-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027268304
Most studies on the acquisition of verbal inflection have examined languages with a single verb suffix. This book offers a study on the acquisition of verb inflections in Q’anjob’al Maya. Q’anjob’al has separate inflections for aspect, subject and object agreement, and status suffixes. The subject and object inflections display a split ergative pattern. The subjects of intransitive verbs with aspect markers take absolutive markers, whereas the subjects of aspectless intransitive verbs take ergative markers. The acquisition of three types of clauses is explored in detail (imperatives, indicatives, and aspectless complements). The data come from longitudinal spontaneous speech of three monolingual Q’anjob’al children aged 1;8–3;5. This book contributes unique data to the debate on the acquisition of finite and non-finite verbs as well as adding to our understanding of the acquisition of split ergative patterns. The book is of interest to researchers and students working on linguistics and language acquisition.
Author : Heriberto Avelino
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 42,30 MB
Release : 2010-08-11
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 144382481X
New Perspectives in Mayan Linguistics is a collection of papers synthesizing the research on Mayan languages at the beginning of the 21st century. One of the most prominent features of the articles included in this book is the balance between the use of the most recent linguistic theories and the empirical data from which analyses are drawn. A definitive characteristic of the book is that all of the papers provide rich and new descriptive material gathered in the field by their respective authors. The findings reported in this book have implications for a deeper understanding not only of particular aspects of the individual grammars of the Mayan family, but might have consequences for linguistic theory as well as for typological and universal generalizations. The volume brings together linguists of diverse areas of specialization phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, epigraphy, lexicography and anthropological linguistics to discuss recent analyses and data from a variety of Mayan languages. For its broad scope summarizing the recent methodologies, theoretical models and findings of research in Mayan languages, the volume is of particular interest to the academic community at large, including researchers, teachers and students alike.
Author : Denis Paperno
Publisher : Springer
Page : 1012 pages
File Size : 11,36 MB
Release : 2017-06-30
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3319443305
This work presents the structure, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions in languages from diverse language families and typological profiles. The current volume pays special attention to underrepresented languages of different status and endangerment level. Languages covered include American and Russian Sign Languages, and sixteen spoken languages from Africa, Australia, Papua, the Americas, and different parts of Asia. The articles respond to a questionnaire the editors constructed to enable detailed crosslinguistic comparison of numerous features. They offer comparable information on semantic classes of quantifiers (generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, partitive), syntactically complex quantifiers (intensive modification, Boolean compounds, exception phrases, etc.), and several more specific issues such as quantifier scope ambiguities, floating quantifiers, and binary (type 2) quantifiers. The book is intended for semanticists, logicians interested in quantification in natural language, and general linguists as articles are meant to be descriptive and theory independent. The book continues and expands the coverage of the Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language (2012) by the same editors, and extends the earlier work in Matthewson (2008), Gil et al. (2013) and Bach et al (1995).
Author : Clifton Pye
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 42,45 MB
Release : 2018-01-26
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 022648131X
The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, Clifton Pye shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. Both an overview of lessons Pye has gleaned from more than thirty years of studying how children learn Mayan languages as well as a strong case for a novel method of researching crosslinguistic language acquisition more broadly, this book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage for untangling the complexities of first language acquisition. Pye here applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages—K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol—showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. His holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children’s lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so. More than this, he expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages’ variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, he argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one’s native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.
Author : Lynda Boudreault
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 743 pages
File Size : 39,10 MB
Release : 2018-08-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3110766272
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.
Author : Elise Newman
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 45,42 MB
Release : 2024-10-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 026237997X
A novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families. Merge is the structure-building operation in Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. In When Arguments Merge, Elise Newman develops a new Merge-based theory of the syntax of argument structure, taking inspiration from wh- questions. She uncovers new connections between disparate empirical phenomena and provides a unified analysis of patterns across many languages and language families, from Mayan to Bantu to Indo-European languages (among others). The result is a syntactic theory with a small inventory of features and categories that can combine in a limited number of ways, capturing the range of argument configurations that we find cross-linguistically in both declarative and interrogative contexts. Newman’s novel approach to argument structure is based on the time at which different kinds of arguments merge and move in the verbal domain. Assuming that all kinds of Merge are driven by features, she proposes that subset relationships between elements bearing different sets of features can constrain the distribution of arguments in unexpected ways and that different feature bundles can predict unusual interactions between arguments in many contexts. The positions of arguments in different contexts have consequences for agreement alignment and case assignment, which are reflected in the Voice of the clause. Examining the order in which verbs and their arguments are combined, she explores the consequences of different orders of combination for the kinds of utterances observed across languages.
Author : Nicole Hober
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 33,95 MB
Release : 2021-11-08
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3110728680
Grammaticalization research looks back on a rich history, but recent empirical findings, as well as new insights from cognitive science and psycholinguistics, entice researchers to reassess and review what we know about the process. This book presents a detailed study of the grammaticalization of motion verbs in the Mayan languages. The focus lies on variation in the parallel grammaticalization of motion verbs into auxiliaries and directionals. It is demonstrated that the genetically related and areally close languages do not always grammaticalize source items in the same way - both from a formal and meaning perspective. The empirical findings suggest that traditional theories on grammaticalization do not capture the complex nature of the phenomenon entirely. Therefore, a Network Approach to grammaticalization is introduced which emphasizes a 'meaning-first' account. The approach seeks to combine the conceptual with the discourse-pragmatic while being firmly grounded in cognitive and psychological facts. New insights into the grammaticalization behavior of the world's languages are offered, while well-established notions and assumptions within the grammaticalization research paradigm are reviewed and challenged.
