The syntax of non-verbal predication in Yucatec Maya

The objective of this paper is to fill a void in the formal syntactic literature on Mayan languages by proposing a syntactic structure for clauses with non-verbal predicates in Yucatec Maya. The paper attempts to integrate the rich descriptions of non-verbal predicate constructions found in more fun...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Armstrong, Grant
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:México
Institución:EL COLEGIO DE MÉXICO
Repositorio:Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:oai.cuadernoslinguistica.colmex.mx:article/73
Acceso en línea:https://cuadernoslinguistica.colmex.mx/index.php/cl/article/view/73
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:non-verbal predicates
small clauses
Yucatec Maya
predicados no verbales
cláusulas mínimas
maya yucateco
Descripción
Sumario:The objective of this paper is to fill a void in the formal syntactic literature on Mayan languages by proposing a syntactic structure for clauses with non-verbal predicates in Yucatec Maya. The paper attempts to integrate the rich descriptions of non-verbal predicate constructions found in more functionally-oriented accounts (Lehmann 2002 [1998]; Verhoeven 2007; Vapnarsky 2013) with insights from the generative literature on argument licensing and clause structure in Mayan languages (Coon 2016 for an overview) as well as small clauses (Citko 2011 for an overview). I conclude that non-verbal sentences in Yucatec are matrix small clauses embedded under an Infl node, which is the locus for finiteness/stative aspect rather than tense morphology. This simple structure, coupled with independently motivated operations that have been proposed for small clauses and argument licensing/word order in Mayan languages, is able to account for a range of properties of these sentences that improves upon previous accounts developed in Armstrong (2010), Pye (2011) and Coon (2014). Original received: 2016/07/13Review sent to author: 2016/11/11Accepted: 2017/05/03