The afterlife of the antipassive

Three examples are presented of reanalyses of antipassives as or in the direction of ordinary transitive constructions, from Tsez, Chukchi, and Mayan languages. In all cases, an antipassive construction remains in the language or language family concerned, thus presenting empirical evidence of reanalysis to parallel earlier hypothesized reconstructions of antipassives to explain synchronic idiosyncrasies

The regularizing, analogical effect of metathesis in Modern Ch'ol (Mayan): The cases of 7ejk'ach ‘fingernail, claw’ and 7ik'oty ‘with, and’

This article examines two instances of metathesis that have occurred in Ch'ol (Mayan) since the late 18th century. While at first, they may seem to be cases of irregular, sporadic change, a closer look at constraints involving ejective consonants within disyllabic and trisyllabic roots or stems suggests that these cases conform to a regular pattern within Ch'ol, and more generally, Mayan languages, in which reflexes of *q’ or *k’ are preferred in medial position in disyllabic roots with a medial glottalized consonant. The data support Hume's (2004) attestation assumption for metathesis, as well as Hock's (1985) structural motivation.

El proclítico verbal a: el vínculo entre el Poqomchi’ y los idiomas mayas cholanos

Some missionary texts written during the Colonial period in the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, K’ichean subgroup) attest the verbal proclitic a, that is being lost in the modern language. It was added to verb forms in the completive aspect marked by the prefix x- and indicated, roughly speaking, the relevance of a past event at the moment of utterance. The same proclitic with similar meaning is also registered in two Mayan languages of the Cholan subgroup: Chontal of Tabasco and Chontal of Acalán. The Poqomchi’ people, despite their origin in the Guatemalan highlands, were neighbors of the Cholan groups for a considerable period of time. It is probable that the proclitic a was introduced to Poqomchi’ during the Postclassic period thanks to language contacts with some Cholan group, possibly the Acalá, who spoke a variety of Chontal, that is, a western Cholan language.

De la protraction en maya?

Overcounting is a neologism which was proposed in the late XXth century to define « the operation that designates a number by its orientation towards a boundary ». With a few examples taken from Asiatic languages, Mayan numerations from Central America are generally given as representative of this uncommon type of linguistic operation to build words for numbers. However, our analysis of the operative pattern in this kind of Mayan numeration (which has cohabited for many centuries with a more simply additive type of number construction) as well as the analysis of the data from pre-hispanic times and the colonial period brought us to question this definition, at least for Mayan languages. Our study indeed shows that the so-called “overcounting” system in Mayan numerations, if it was definitely present there a long time before the Europeans, was strongly associated to an aspect of the comput that sets to work an “encapsulation” of the vigesimal scores and where a number is actually not designated for its orientation towards the higher boundary but where the aim is to process in a non-linear way following an “encapsulation of the numerical knots” and looking for a retrograde anteriority.

Morphosyntactic features of progressive in the K’iche’an languages of the Mayan family

The article deals with the morphosyntactic features of the aspectual category of progressive in K’iche’an languages. The analysis is carried out using methods of intragenetic typology. It is proposed to clarify Vinogradov’s classification of progressive in the Mayan languages in relation to the K’iche’an group. Three types of K’iche’an progressive as well as three strategies for the distribution of ergative–absolutive markers in the progressive are proposed. The boundary between the uniclausal and biclausal analyses of complex aspect constructions in Mayan languages is proposed. The application to K’iche’an languages Robert Dixon’s generalization for aspectually based split ergativity is also described. Three strategies of verb argument marking in the progressive constructions are determined. It was found out that all aspectually conditioned splits in the ergative–absolutive strategy of argument marking in K’iche’an languages are observed in progressive (or historically progressive) constructions.

Optional agreement in Santiago Tz’utujil (Mayan) is syntactic

Some Mayan languages display optional verbal agreement with 3pl arguments (Dayley1985; Henderson2009; England2011). Focusing on novel data from Santiago Tz’utujil (ST), we demonstrate that this optionality is not reducible to phonological or morphological factors. Rather, the source of optionality is in the syntax. Specifically, the distinction between arguments generated in the specifier position and arguments generated in the complement position governs the pattern. Only base-complements control agreement optionally; base-specifiers control agreement obligatorily. We provide an analysis in which optional agreement results from the availability of two syntactic representations (DP vs. reduced nominal argument). Thus, while the syntactic operation Agree is deterministic, surface optionality arises when the operation targets two different sized goals.

Nominalization and selection in two Mayan languages

In ‘Nominalization and selection in two Mayan languages’ Coon and Royer investigate nominalization in languages from two subbranches of the Mayan family: Ch’ol and Chuj. At the heart of this work is the tension between semantic requirements of certain roots, and the syntactic structure available to license arguments in different types and sizes of constructions. The fact that roots in Mayan belong to well-defined and diagnosable root classes, combined with the rich inventory of derivational morphology, sheds light on the division of labor between roots and functional heads in governing the appearance of nominal arguments. The authors show that roots belonging to transitive and (unaccusative) intransitive classes in Ch’ol and Chuj always require semantic saturation of an argument slot, but that this is accomplished by different means in the Mayan equivalents of the types of nominalizations examined in Chomsky 1970. They attribute this difference to the variation in the realization of the internal argument to the site of nominalization—specifically, to the presence or absence of functional heads available internal to the nominalization to syntactically license arguments.