Olivier Le Guen

Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social | CIESAS · Department of Linguistics

This paper analyzes spatial gestures and cognition in a new, or so-called “emerging”, visual language, the Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YSML). This sign language was created by deaf and hearing signers in various Yucatec Maya villages on the Yucatec Peninsula (Mexico). Although the sign language is not a signed version of spoken Yucatec Maya, both l...

This article analyzes the construction of sign names in an emerging sign language from Mexico, the Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL). Data comes from elicited interviews as well as natural interactions collected by the authors and signers from two different villages, Chicán and Nohkop. Despite YMSL being an isolate language, sign name construction...

In many sign languages, space is used to express grammatical features. However, verb agreement in space is noticeably slow to appear in emerging sign languages. Many reasons have been proposed to explain this delay or even absence: the reduced size of the community, the recent creation of the sign language and the lack of exposure to a fully formed...

Definición y orígenes El relativismo lingüístico se puede definir de manera sencilla como la forma en la que el lenguaje influye en el pensamiento. Por lo tanto, las variaciones lingüísticas (en el lexicón, las formas gramaticales, etc.) producen, de forma causal, variaciones cognitivas. Sin embargo, esta definición es demasiado simple y tomada de...

El presente volumen es un libro explicativo de temas sociolingüísticos dirigido principalmente a quienes se dedican a la docencia de lenguas (extranjeras o lenguas nacionales originarias), ya sea que estén formándose para este fin o que ya se encuentren en la labor de manera profesional. En particular, el libro tiene la finalidad general de crear c...

Metacognitive abilities are considered as a hallmark of advanced human cognition. Existing empirical studies have exclusively focused on populations from Western and industrialized societies. Little is known about young children’s metacognitive abilities in other societal and cultural contexts. Here we tested 4-year-old Yucatec Mayan (a rural nativ...

As a turn-design strategy, repeating another has been described for English as a fairly restricted way of constructing a response, which, through re-saying what another speaker just said, is exploitable for claiming epistemic primacy, and thus avoided when a second speaker has no direct experience. Conversations in Mesoamerican languages present a...

En esta sección se propone una presentación básica del programa ELAN y sus ventajas para el análisis lingüístico, en específico para grabaciones multimodales (audio y gestos) y para lenguas de señas (únicamente visuales). Una gran ventaja de ELAN es que es un programa que siempre se está actualizando para así responder a las necesidades de los inve...

This contribution is the introduction for the special issue of Gesture entitled “Anthropology of Gesture”. As such, it raises two main questions: how do gestures contribute to the field of anthropology? And, inversely, how anthropology can improve our understanding of gesture and gestural behaviours? Of particular importance for this special issue,...

In recent years, awareness of and research attention to “emerging sign languages” around the world has increased dramatically (Meir et al. 2010). This volume brings together the first set of works treating these new languages, linguistic communities, and sign systems in the Americas, including North America, Central America, South America, and the...

In this study we analyze the importance of the presence of tunk’ul in the carnival celebrations in Pomuch, Campeche. We describe the ritual and propose an analysis of the ceremonial chant in which this instrument plays a fundamental role. We detail the interrelation between the various spatial, temporal and social components composing this ceremony...

Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding...

En este trabajo analizamos la presencia del tunk’ul en los festejos del Carnaval en Pomuch, Campeche. Además, efectuamos una descripción del ritual y un análisis del canto ceremonial en el cual el instrumento conforma un eslabón de primer orden. Nuestra aproximación, mediante fuentes etnológicas, históricas y lingüísticas, revela también la interre...

Resumen En este trabajo analizamos la presencia del tunk'ul en los festejos del Carnaval en Pomuch, Campeche. Además, efectuamos una descripción del ritual y un análisis del canto ceremonial en el cual el instrumento conforma un eslabón de primer orden. Nuestra aproximación, mediante fuentes etnológicas, históricas y lingüísticas, revela también la...

In this article, we examine various strategies used to express cardinal numbers in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs) from three historically unrelated communities in Yucatán, Mexico: Chicán, Nohkop, and Cepeda Peraza. Our findings describe some numeral strategies, which remained unattested in previous accounts, and demonstrate that YMSL numerals...

For centuries, linguistic description has been somehow limited because it was not possible to record audio and video. For this reason, the intrinsic multimodal nature of human language has been left out, putting aside various types of information both prosodic and visual. This work analyzes the ways in which gestures complement speech, taking into...

Many studies have supported the idea that human interaction relies on cooperation and joint action, implying that everyday communication has primarily a social motivation. According to Grice, interlocutors are expected to meet the informational needs of their interactional partner(s) in both accuracy and informativeness. However, conversional princ...

This work shows to what extent there exists a distinctive (Yucatec) Maya conception of time, in which time is not metaphorically linear and can be conceived as “structurally cyclical”. I will take examples from two languages that can be considered to belong to the same culture, namely Yucatec Maya culture. The first is Yucatec Maya considered from...

What's archaeology got to do with it? Archaeology contributes to cognitive science in two key areas. First, in understanding human cognitive evolution, archaeology furnishes critical data on the timing and context of developments (Wynn, 2002). This approach assumes minds make tools: increasing complexity in material forms is an effect of, and thus...

Esta presentación expone ciertas diferencias fundamentales entre la gramática del español y del maya yucateco y las implicaciones muy profundas que es tiene en cuanto a la (falta de) traducción y promoción del maya.

Dans cet article, je montre pourquoi il n'existe pas, à proprement parler, de domaine émotionnel en maya yucatèque au moins au niveau linguistique. Cependant, loin de prétendre qu'il n'existe pas d'émotions, j'analyse comment les émotions ne constituent pas un domaine à part et comment la sémantique de chaque terme émotionnel s'étend à d'autres dom...

In order to make sense of the world, humans tend to see causation almost everywhere. Although most causal relations may seem straightforward, they are not always construed in the same way cross-culturally. In this study, we investigate concepts of “chance,” “coincidence,” or “randomness” that refer to assumed relations between intention, action, an...

"Many authors suggest that temperature meaning is primarily defined through" "bodily experience (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2007; Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Rakhi" "lina 2006). While this is probably the case for the basic meaning of many temperature terms around the world, some languages nonetheless use temperature terms to refer to categorical temperatures. I...

El fenómeno de la integración de préstamos en las lenguas indígenas de México se ha vuelto un tema muy sensible estos últimos años, sobre todo porque se utiliza como argumento decisivo dentro del debate político-cultural entre la comunidad hispano-mexicana y los grupos indígenas. Estos últimos en busca de la legitimación de sus estructuras política...

This paper presents the range of expressive morphology that exists in Yucatec Maya showing how a careful analysis of expressive derivations can contribute to our understanding of the interaction between morphemes, roots and stems in this language. Roots in Yucatec Maya can only be categorized in broad classes since derivation is very productive and...

This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter-generational changes in native Itza' Maya and immigrant Ladino populations of Guatemala's Petén rainforest concerning understanding of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. We find dr...

In this preliminary research, which makes use of archaeological, epigraphic and ethnological information, we present certain arguments showing a linguistic and conceptual continuity in the Mayan dwelling as a delimited space. The visible and invisible boundaries that temporarily or permanently enclose or divide up its space seem quite similar in th...

In numerous languages, space provides a productive domain for the expression of time. This paper examines how time-to-space mapping is realized in Yucatec Maya. At the linguistic level, Yucatec Maya has numerous resources to express deictic time, whereas expression of sequential time is highly constrained. Specifically, in gesture, we do not find a...

In their introduction, Beller et al. point to important issues regarding the problematic interaction of anthropology and cognitive sciences (CS). I address some of these issues in stressing first some limitations of the current state of the fields of anthropology and CS. In the second half of this article, using data from studies I have been conduc...

In this article, I analyze how supernatural entities play a significant role in Maya daily life. I argue for a sociality approach that considers supernatural entities as social agents with whom relationships are not defined by ritual only, but are regarded as similar to other types of social relationships only ruled by specific communicative constr...

This paper aims at providing a systematic framework for investigating differences in how people point to existing spaces. Pointing is considered according to two conditions: (1) A non-transposed condition where the body of the speaker always constitutes the origo and where the various types of pointing are differentiated by the status of the target...

Does our perception of others' emotional signals depend on the language we speak or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture? It is well established that human emotional facial expressions are perceived categorically by viewers, but whether this is driven by perceptual or linguistic mechanisms is debated. We report an investiga...

In previous analyses of the influence of language on cognition, speech has been the main channel examined. In studies conducted among Yucatec Mayas, efforts to determine the preferred frame of reference in use in this community have failed to reach an agreement (Bohnemeyer & Stolz, 2006; Levinson, 2003 vs. Le Guen, 2006, 2009). This paper argues fo...

In this article, sensory vocabulary relating to color, texture, and other sensory experiences in Yucatec Maya (a language spoken in Mexico) is examined, and its possible relation to material culture practices explored. In Yucatec Maya, some perceptual experience can be expressed in a fine-grained way through a compact one-word adjective. Complex no...

Fieldwork conducted among the Yucatec Maya of Mexico reveals that this group preferentially uses a geocentric frame of reference in both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Contrary to other cultural groups (such as the Guugu Yimithir of Australia or Tzeltal of México), this frame does not seem to rely on the use of specific spatial terms (such as...

The aim of this article is to analyze the funerary customs and ritual for the souls among contemporary Yucatec Maya in order to better understand their relations with pre-Hispanic burial patterns. It is suggested that the souls of the dead are considered as ancestors that can be distinguished between family and collective ancestors considering seve...

Les histoires mayas de Jésus-Christ Les recueils de tradition orale maya enregistrent au fil des terrains l’occurrence de l’histoire de Jésus-Christ dans plusieurs ethnies mayas, à différents moments du xxe siècle, et sous des formes stylistiques distinctes. L’aspect le plus frappant de ces versions est la pluralité des noms concurrents que porte J...

1. Présentation du sermon de sainte Rose Le sermon de sainte Rose en lan­gue tzeltalque nous présen­tons au lecteur a une histoire incer­taine ; l’identité de son auteur l’est également. Nous savons qu’il fut écrit en 1798 et qu’il appartient àune série d’autres textes (le plus ancien datant de 1675) qui font partie de la collection de documents éc...

When the dead come home… Remarks on ancestor worship among the Lowland Mayas. In Amerindian ethnographical literature, ancestor worship is often mentioned but evidence of its existence is lacking. This article will try to demonstrate that some Lowland Maya do worship ancestors ; it will use precise criteria taken from ethnological studies of societ...