Table 1 - uploaded by Christian Lehmann
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Maybe the most pervasive among the changes analyzable as cases of grammaticalization in the languages of the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan stock is the formation of auxiliaries that allow finer tense/aspect/mood distinctions than the status suffixes inherited from Proto-Maya. It has been continually productive since colonial times. While this amoun...
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... proto-language then switched to right-branching syntax; proto- Maya was right-branching. To this day, Mayan languages are left-branching or juxtapositive only in the nominal syntax, as shown in Table 2; the rest of the syntax is right-branching, as detailed in Table 1. (The vague wording of the Table 2 heading reflects the fact that some dependency relations inside the NP (or DP) are less than clear.) ...
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Citations
... (Bohnemeyer, 2002, p. 41-42;Smith, 1997). This has been noted in a number of works on the Yucatec TAM-system (Bohnemeyer, 2002;Vinogradov, 2013;Lehmann, 2017), and it is not an aspectual property specific to Yucatec. Rather, it follows the "most typical subdivisions of imperfectivity" according to Comrie (1976, p. 25) in which the habitual and the progressive are both part of the category of 'imperfective aspect' (see Figure 4). ...
In this paper, we present data from an elicitation study and a corpus study that support the observation that the Yucatec Maya progressive aspect auxiliary táan is replaced by the habitual auxiliary k in sentences with contrastively focused fronted objects. Focus has been extensively studied in Yucatec, yet the incompatibility of object fronting and progressive aspect in Yucatec Maya remains understudied. Both our experimental results and our corpus study point in the direction that this incompatibility may very well be categorical. Theoretically, we take a progressive reading to be derived from an imperfectivity operator in combination with a singular operator, and we propose that this singular operator implicates the negation of event plurality, leading to an exhaustive interpretation which ranks below corrective focus on a contrastive focus scale. This means that, in a sentence with object focus fronting, the use of the marked auxiliary táan (as opposed to the more general k) would trigger two contrastive foci, which would be an unlikely and probably dispreferred speech act.
... Maya is typologically an ergative, pro-drop, agglutinative and largely synthetic language (Verhoeven 2007). It is derived from Proto-Maya and Proto-Yucatec (for a timeline, see Lehmann, 2017). ...
... Asociación Academias de la lengua española 2010) Mayan independent pronominals and indirect object pronominals (cf. Kovačević et al. 2007;Lehmann 2017) -overt subject pronominals = NOM -unaccented direct object pronouns = ACC -indirect object pronouns = dative case device for emphasis = case assignment according to the verb -indirect object = no case assignment Since Spanish is a pro-drop language, overt personal pronouns are only used in certain contexts, such as emphasis, e.g. yo 'me/I' in "¿Llamó Jaime? ...
... Proto-Yucatec had also independent pronominals that were built with the particle haʔ and the set B-pronominals (Lacadena 2013). In Colonial Yucatec Maya, i.e. after the Spanish conquest, the independent and the indirect object pronominals were reinforced forms of the set B-pronominals, built with the grammatical preposition ti' (Lehmann, 2017;Smailus 1989). Since unbound pronominals existed before contact with Spanish and the morphological change from the formation with haʔ to ti' occurred also before it, it is unlikely that any OG/RG took place. ...
This contribution aims to analyse the language contact phenomena between Yucatec Maya and Spanish, focusing specifically on the case of pronominals. This empirical study takes place in the village of Xocén in Yucatán, Mexico where most locals speak Maya while Spanish is the official language also spoken by many (bilingual) locals. The use of pronominals in Maya differs from Spanish in terms of morphology, functions, case assignment, syntactic conditions, and discourse conditions. I apply the interface hypothesis developed by Sorace (2011) which expects bilinguals to show optionality in the use of pronominals that require specific syntactic and discourse conditions (interface), and the contact-induced language change hypothesis developed by Heine and Kuteva (2003) which expects the formation of the pronominals in Maya to be influenced by Spanish. In a case study with three monolingual Mayan speakers and six bilingual Mayan-Spanish speakers, I collected freely produced speech data in Maya focusing on the use of pronominals and analysed the different functions these pronominals fulfil. The results show that bilinguals do display optionality regarding certain pronominals that exist at interfaces and that no influence of Spanish can be found in the Mayan pronominal system. Therefore, Maya-Spanish bilingualism can be better characterised by Sorace’s interface hypothesis (2011) than by contact-induced grammaticalisation (Heine and Kuteva 2003).
... (105) Modern Yucatec Maya [Lehmann 2017: 216] bíin suu-nak-Ø yéetel bíin=in wil-eh-Ø ...
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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.
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Univerbation is the syntagmatic condensation of a sequence of words recurrent in discourse into one word, as when the Spanish combination a tras (to back) becomes atrás ‘behind’. It affects both lexemes and grammatical formatives. Unlike processes of word formation, including conversion of a syntactic construction into a word, as in forget-me-not, and compounding, as in Spanish lavaplatos ‘dishwasher’, univerbation is a spontaneous process.
There are two main types of univerbation: Phrasal univerbation downgrades a phrase to a word, as when Latin terrae motus ‘earth’s movement’ becomes Spanish terremoto ‘earthquake’. Transgressive univerbation coalesces a string of words which do not form a syntagma into a word, as when French par ce que becomes parce que.
A set of univerbations may share structural features and may therefore evolve into a pattern of compounding. Thus, blackbird originated by univerbation, but may now provide a pattern of compounding. As a consequence, univerbation and compounding are not always easily distinguishable.
The discussion uses empirical evidence adduced in earlier work, mostly from Romance and Germanic languages. Its aim is not to present novel phenomena but to provide a theoretical background for the phenomenology and improve on available analyses.
Keywords: univerbation, chunking, compounding, lexicalization, collocation, word
Cambridge Core - Grammar and Syntax - World Lexicon of Grammaticalization - by Tania Kuteva
The history of either as a clause-final, right-periphery marker has seen little intensive research, apart from a few isolated studies such as Rullmann (2002) and Gast (2013). This is surprising, given the recent interest in parenthetical discourse items and the controversies surrounding their development (grammaticalization vs. pragmaticalization, and other debates). In the present study, it is first questioned whether right-periphery either (RP-either) could be categorized as a bona fide example of a discourse marker, and second, how a hypothesis emerged that 18th and 19th century prescriptivism motivated its sudden shift to become a post-negation, clause-final item, replacing the now non-standard, right-periphery neither (e.g. Jespersen 1917, Fitzmaurice and Smith 2012). The present study builds on the previous accounts, suggesting that the use of either as a clause-final additive focus marker had grammaticalized from a resumptive quantifier, post-posed in apposition and gradually renovating the former functions of clause-final neither in strong negative polarity contexts by a process of grammaticalization following co-optation (Heine 2013). The social stigmatization of right-periphery neither (RP-neither) as an example of negative concord at the time must therefore have been due simply to its resulting association with recessive, dialectal or non-standard usage, as RP-either rapidly increased its earlier range of functions to take over those of the ousted RP-neither in strong negative polarity contexts during the 19th century.
