Danny Law

Split Ergativity in the History of the Ch’olan Branch of the Mayan Language Family

An unchallenged assumption regarding the linguistic history of the Ch’olan branch of the Mayan language family is that this common language was “split ergative”—demonstrating an ergative/absolutive pattern of pronominal inflection in the completive aspect and a nominative/accusative pattern in the incompletive. Such a hypothesis is untenable in light of the data, which show that the Ch’olti’an branch of Ch’olan did not share in the split ergative innovation. To support this conclusion, the evolutionary history of tense/aspect in each of the modern Ch’olan languages is presented. From a straight ergative ancestral system, a typologically plausible series of changes can account for various systems found in the modern languages. No such account is possible if scholars assume a split ergative system for Common Ch’olan.

Language contact, inherited similarity and social difference : the story of linguistic interaction in the Maya lowlands

This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.

Inherited similarity and contact-induced change in Mayan Languages

Similarity has been cited, generally anecdotally, as a significant factor shaping the outcomes of language contact. A detailed investigation of long-term contact among more than a dozen related Lowland Mayan languages has yielded specific examples of contact-induced language changes that, I argue, were facilitated by the systematic similarities shared by these languages because of genetic relatedness. Three factors that seem to have been particularly relevant in the Mayan case are 1) the high degree of overlap in linguistic structure, which would have allowed significant interlingual conflation, the collapsing of language boundaries at points of similarity between the languages, 2) the paradigmatic interchangeability of particular elements of related languages without the need for adaptation or accommodation, which facilitated the borrowing of various kinds of linguistic material, particularly bound morphemes, that in other contexts have been found to be highly resistant to borrowing, and 3) contact-induced drift, parallel secondary developments in more than one language that were triggered by contact-induced innovations but subsequently proceeded along similar paths of change after contact because of the preexisting structural similarities that the languages shared as a result of their common inheritance. I argue that these processes of change are much less likely, if not impossible, in situations of contact between unrelated languages, and suggest specific ways in which contact between genetically related languages can be qualitatively different from contact between unrelated languages.

From Valency to Aspect in the Ch’olan-Tzeltalan Family of Mayan

This paper traces the evolution of the Common Mayan derivational suffixes *-V-ng and *-V-j into their descendant forms in the Ch’olan-Tzeltalan languages. Specifically, the paper outlines a remarkable but markedly consistent shift from a transitivizing, derivational morpheme to an aspectual, inflectional suffix, whose most far-reaching fate is a negative future marker in Ch’orti’. It is only by firmly focusing on the systems of grammatical relationships that one can realize an informed, historical account of the series of shifts that brought the ancestral form to the forms attested in the several daughter languages.

AREAL SHIFTS IN CLASSIC MAYAN PHONOLOGY

Abstract Advances in hieroglyphic decipherment and in language contact typology provide new data and theories with which to investigate and reassess prior interpretations of Mayan linguistic history. The present study considers the shift from proto-Mayan *k and *k to /ch/ and /ch/, a sound change that affected several Mayan languages in different phonological contexts. This sound change, with a very particular set of conditions, has been highlighted as a defining feature of the Cholan-Tseltalan branch of the Mayan language family. New evidence suggests that this sound change was shared as a result of contact around the time of the Classic period, rather than reflecting an inherited sound change that would have taken place at a much earlier stage of the language family. Hieroglyphic data provide further evidence that this sound change was adopted in the hieroglyphic language in a word-by-word fashion, rather than applying to all similar phonological contexts at the same time.