Nora C. England

Ergativity in Mamean (Mayan) Languages

0. Introduction. The Mamean branch of the Eastern Mayan languages includes Mam, Teco, Ixil, and Aguacatec. All are spoken in the western highlands of Guatemala and all, like other Mayan languages, have an ergative pattern of verbal inflection (although the different languages vary in detail) (Larsen and Norman 1980:348). Mam is the largest of the Mamean languages, with well over 400,000 speakers, and is the language I will base my discussion on, using data from the town of San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan. Nouns in Mam have no case marking, but direct arguments are crossreferenced on the verb through two sets of inflectional prefixes. One set, the ergative, cross-references the agents of transitive verbs (and also marks possessors on nouns); the other set, the absolutive, cross-references the patients of transitive verbs and the subjects of intransitive verbs. These two sets combine with a single set of enclitics to indicate all of the different possibilities of person and number, as in table 1.2 The variants are mostly phonologically conditioned. The following examples illustrate the ergative patterning on verbs. Examples (1) and (2) are transitive verbs, and so have two person markers to indicate the participants: first the patient is indicated by the

Training speakers of indigenous languages of Latin America at a US university

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Plurality Agreement in Some Eastern Mayan Languages1

A preliminary analysis of texts shows that third-person plural agreement marking in K’ichee’ is obligatory for animate nouns and optional but strongly dispreferred for inanimate nouns. In Mam, however, plural agreement marking is strongly preferred but still optional for animate nouns and, while it is not preferred for inanimate nouns, it is used with much greater frequency than in K’ichee’. It is likely that in K’ichee’ an innovative syntactic rule for agreement marking has been introduced that requires it for animates and not for inanimates, thus converting a pragmatic strategy, still used in Mam, to a syntactic strategy that pays attention to animacy features.

To Tell a Tale: The Structure of Narrated Stories in Mam, A Mayan Language1

This article explores the structure of narrative tales (myth/history, folktales) in Mam. Linguistic and stylistic features that are characteristic of tales include the use of an anchoring adverb within the first few clauses, patterns of the use of aspect markers that are typical of all narrative, the extensive and obligatory use of quoted dialogue, the optional use of ideophones as a part of narrative performance, and codas that locate the tale within local tradition and traditional transmission. None of these features is restricted to tales, but together they define the genre and enable it to be instantly recognizable. It is the particular combination of linguistic and stylistic features that sets the genre apart.

Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing language shift, revisited: A 21 st century perspective . Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001. Pp. xvi, 503. Pb

This volume revisits, as its title states, the theory and practice of reversing language shift (RLS) first proposed by Fishman in 1991. A dozen of the original case studies are reanalyzed and several more are added, producing a rich source of detail on some of the specific situations of language shift and efforts to reverse it. Fishman contributes introductory and concluding chapters as well as one of the case studies (Yiddish); other authors cover Navajo, New York Puerto Rican Spanish, Quebec French, Otomi, Quechua, Irish, Frisian, Basque, Catalan, Oko, Andamanese, Ainu, Hebrew, immigrant languages in Australia, indigenous languages in Australia, and Maori. The resulting book provides a wealth of information about language shift and public policy directed toward RLS, but its aims are broader than that.