Fixed-VSO word order in Mayan is a syntactic, not prosodic, innovation

I argue that verb movement should be derived in narrow syntax. The derivational system of Labeling Algorithm proposed by Chomsky (2013, 2015) allows movement to occur in narrow syntax without recourse to any movement‐triggering features, contra Chomsky (2001, 2004, 2008). In this system, (both external and internal) Merge is free, even if a new semantic effect does not occur on a raised category in its raised position, contra Chomsky (2001). Thus, verb movement, which does not change a semantic interpretation in the unmarked case, should be able to occur in narrow syntax without recourse to any driving features. As we see in the Icelandic data, it is actually difficult to claim that verb movement occurs in phonology, contra Chomsky (2001). I propose a way to carry out verb movement in narrow syntax in terms of feature inheritance and copy deletion. In the Romance languages as well as languages such as English, both φ‐features and tense are inherited by T, to which R(=V)+v* moves, whereas in the V2 languages, only φ‐features are inherited by T with tense remaining in C, to which R+v* directly moves. In all of those languages, it is a matter of morphophonology which copy of a verbal head, the one in a higher position or the one in the v* head position, is chosen to be pronounced. I also claim that do is inserted in English to phonetically embody features such as [Q], [Foc(us)] and [Pol(arity)]. The feature that the inserted do embodies is adjacent to tense and φ‐features in each of the relevant constructions, which accounts for why the inserted do carries tense and agreement as pointed out by the traditional literature.

Reviewed by: The comparative method of language acquisition research by Clifton Pye Katherine Demuth The comparative method of language acquisition research. By Clifton Pye. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 304. ISBN 9780226481289 (Hb). $150. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on language acquisition and a testament to Clifton Pye’s life’s work on the acquisition of Mayan languages. It comes at a timely juncture, after a flurry of crosslinguistic studies of language acquisition during the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Slobin 1985, 1992). Researchers are now again reawakening to the fact that, to make theoretical progress in the field, we need to understand how languages with very different typological structures are acquired. As P notes, comparing the acquisition of closely related languages is also extremely valuable and can tell us much about both the course of language acquisition and why it proceeds as it does. Thus, just as comparative/historical linguistics provides a framework for refining theories of linguistic structure, comparing the acquisition of closely related languages provides an ideal laboratory from which to understand the ‘universals’ of language acquisition. One of the challenges, however, is translating this comparative understanding to languages that are typologically very different. As P notes, this raises the question of what the units of comparison are. Even the notion of a ‘word’ is not always straightforward in morphologically rich or polysynthetic languages. Calculating mean length of utterance (MLU) can thus be a challenge for making comparisons across typologically different languages (though see suggestions for how to do this in other polysynthetic languages in Allen & Dench 2015). The author then puts research on the acquisition of Mayan languages into a larger context, illustrating how the comparative method (henceforth CM) helps us understand why children produce the early forms of language that they do. P’s finding that children learning Mayan languages [End Page 814] tend to produce the stressed syllable of the verb complex, which may or may not land on the verb stem, is extremely revealing of the much more ‘universal’ processes found across typologically different languages (cf. Swedish; Peters & Strömqvist 1996). P then goes into detail regarding the CM, how it has been applied in historical linguistics, and the acquisition implications for Mayan and other language families. He suggests that much comparative acquisition research involving European languages has been conducted in the context of testing different theories of syntax and/or acquisition, whereas the CM can also be used with a more theory-neutral goal of describing how children acquire a linguistic system more generally. He then presents an overview of the structure of Mayan languages, outlining the general synthetic structure of these languages, providing details about the form of the lexicon, the structure of the Mayan verb (including person-marking and verb suffixes), the realization of stative predicates and verb nominalization processes, and syntactic processes more generally. This is then followed by a description of acquisition data from three Mayan languages. Two of these data sets P collected himself (K’iche: six children, Mam: eleven children), while the third (Ch’oi: five children) was collected by members of the community (for more detail, see pp. 98–100). P provides comparative examples of each. P then discusses the Mayan lexicon (nouns, relational nouns, adjectives, transitive and intransitive verbs, positionals, particles, pronouns) and how these categories are acquired across the three different Mayan languages. P notes that these categories are put to different uses across languages, resulting in different acquisition patterns. However, all of these languages exhibit cross-reference marking on nouns and verbs, licensing the omission of lexical arguments. This results in the verb playing a more important role in the Mayan grammar than in a language like English, as it does in many morphologically rich languages. The summary in this chapter includes a brief mention of how the acquisition of related Greater Tzeltalan languages differs from that of the Mayan languages (cf. Pye, Pfeiler, & Mateo Pedro 2017), some of this having to do with focus and person marking. He then examines the acquisition of Mayan intransitive and transitive verb complexes, respectively. The templatic structure of the morphologically complex verb, including the verb root and...

This chapter presents several approaches to the syntax of verb‐initial (V1) languages with a special emphasis on Mayan and Austronesian languages. Some V1 languages are strictly VSO, others are VOS, and a significant number combine both orders. This chapter focuses on data from VSO/VOS languages and the factors that underlie these alternations. A number of V1 languages can be more adequately characterized as predicate‐initial, with V1 representing just a subset of possible clause‐initial predicates. The chapter presents a number of structural properties that are or may be associated with V1 and discusses possible implicational relations between such properties and V1. While there are certain common characteristics observed across V1 languages, it is also clear that there are several distinct subtypes of V1. These subtypes call for different syntactic analyses; main approaches include the derivation of V1 via phrasal movement (VP‐raising) and via head‐movement (verb‐raising). Other syntactic approaches to the derivation of V1 include the parametrization of specifier direction within a single language, non‐configurational syntax, and subject lowering. In addition to these purely syntactic analyses, several recent approaches place the derivation of V1 outside syntax or at the syntax–PF interface. Careful, in‐depth analyses of individual languages are required to test the different approaches to V1; in quite a few cases such analyses are still lacking.

Following the spirit, but not the same mechanism, of Kayne’s (1998, 2000) overt syntactic derivational analysis of focus-related elements such as only, also/too, and even in English, this paper explores the nature of focus feature organization in narrow syntax (NS) with special reference to the additive use of the focus particle mo ‘also’ in Japanese. First, it is argued that, in spite of their attractiveness, at least the versions of LF focus particle movement analysis of association with focus entertained in Aoyagi (1998, 1999, 2006) are faced with theoretical/empirical problems. Then, it is claimed that association with focus in Japanese should be best captured in overt syntax without recourse to any LF movement operations, while keeping to Aoyagi’s (1998, 1999, 2006) original insight of taking association with focus as “focus feature agreement or sharing.” In so doing, a new hypothesis for focus feature organization in NS (Focus Feature-Splitting Hypothesis) is proposed, which dictates that in principle an interpretable focus feature [focus] and an uninterpretable focus feature [uFoc] in the domain of the Foc head occupied by mo can be separated under some “locality condition” based on phases. To the extent that the proposed overt syntactic derivational approach is on the right track, it provides another empirical support for the single-cycle computational system for NS in the faculty of language (FL), entertained in Kayne (1998, 2000), Epstein et al. (1998), Chomsky (2001b, 2004), and Epstein and Seely (2006) inter alia.

This research paper investigates the syntax of idiomatic expressions consisting of the verb and the object/accompanying adjunct (VP idiomatic expressions, henceforth) in two Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA). It shows that in order for VP idiomatic expressions to obtain their idiomatic reading, the predominate pattern of the word order in each variety (i.e., the VSO word order in MSA, but the SVO word order in JA) should be used; otherwise idiomaticity is not possible (with few exceptional cases discussed in the paper). We offer evidence that this restriction on the idiomaticity of VP idiomatic expressions in Arabic varieties follows from a proposed condition that the subject (even if it is not part of the idiomatic expression) and the verb (in addition to the object) should maintain a structurally local relation with each other in the narrow syntax, i.e. they should be included in the vP phase before the spell-out point. The paper shows that the movement of the verb to T0 in MSA and JA or lack thereof does not break idiomaticity, nor does the movement of the subject to Spec,TP in JA. These facts are taken as an indication that a distinction between narrow-syntax and post-spellout movements should be made. This provides evidence for proposals that distinguish between pre- and post-spellout movements (cf. Chomsky 2001, among others).

Mopan in Context:Mayan Identity, Belizean Citizenship, and the Future of a Language Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar (bio) and William Salmon (bio) mayan communities in belize have been largely excluded from the linguistic inquiry into Mayan languages that began in the late nineteenth century, as well as from the grassroots movements that have promoted the revitalization of Mayan languages in Guatemala more recently.1 In the absence of academic interest, limited attention to grassroots activism, and a lack of publishing opportunities for authors, the issues affecting Mayan languages in Belize have been relegated to the periphery of larger discussions about Mayan languages in Mesoamerica.2 Even as attention turns to speakers of Mayan languages living in the United States, Mayan migrants from Belize continue to be absent from research on the Mayan diaspora.3 As such, the study reported on in this article is the first to look in depth at the ecology in which the Mopan language resides.4 Significantly, it is also the first study to consider the implications of a young generation of ethnic Mayans growing up as native speakers of Kriol. Our findings in this article suggest that a language shift from Mopan to Kriol is underway among the younger generations of Mopan speakers and that if its use among this demographic is not revitalized, it could lead to Mopan's endangerment in the near future. The larger discussion focuses on geopolitical and socioeconomic factors that influence language attitudes toward Spanish, English, and Kriol in Belize, contributing to an ongoing body of work on Belizean languages in general.5 The Mopan Language Family and History Mopan belongs to the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan language family, which also includes Yucatec, Itza', and Lacandón. Yucatec and Lacandón are primarily spoken in Mexico, with the former having an estimated eight hundred thousand speakers and the latter seriously endangered, with approximately one thousand speakers. Itza' is spoken in the Petén region of northern Guatemala and is also severely endangered. Mopan is one of two Yucatecan languages spoken in Belize, and it is believed to have approximately ten thousand speakers.6 There are an additional five thousand speakers of Mopan in [End Page 70] Guatemala; they are concentrated in in San Luis and in the Lake Petén Itzá road area (an enclave between Dolores and Poptun) within the department of Petén.7 Both of the Mayan languages spoken in this area of Guatemala, Mopan and Itzá, have been identified by the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG) as endangered languages and have been targeted for revitalization efforts.8 Over the last few centuries, speakers of Mayan languages in Guatemala, including Mopan, have been subjected to a process of castellanización, or Hispanicization, that parallels the experiences of speakers of indigenous languages in other former Spanish colonies.9 Unlike Guatemala and the rest of Central America, however, the official language of colonial British Honduras (now Belize) was standard British English. Speakers of Mayan languages were subjected to a process of Anglicization. This process has continued since Belize gained its independence in 1981 and become increasingly complex: the American English standard variety has overtaken British English in terms of overt prestige, and Kriol now holds both covert and overt prestige as a lingua franca qua national language.10 Political Setting While most former English colonies obtained their independence from the British Empire in the 1960s, Belize had to assess three interrelated factors before claiming its independence. It had to consider first the threat of a Guatemalan invasion of Belize during the former's civil war (1960–96); second, the brutal genocide against Mayan populations across the border in the Petén region; third, the ongoing territorial dispute between the countries over the existence and precise location of the Belizean-Guatemalan border.11 The factors remain salient, as their potential threat has not attenuated in the years since the end of the Guatemalan civil war. The territorial dispute is still very much alive, with the territory involved including the southern section of Belize District, most of Cayo District, and the entirety of Stann Creek and Toledo Districts, which are home to the Kekchi and Mopan...

This paper considers the question of formal complexity measurement within linguistic minimalism and argues that information structure properties should not be encoded in narrow syntax as features triggering movement, suggesting that the relevant information is established at the interfaces. Also, it argues for a minimalist model of grammar in which complexity arises out of the cyclic interaction of subderivations. This model allows one to rephrase the question of the formal complexity of a generative grammar, such that a different answer is forthcoming depending on whether we consider the grammar as a whole, or just narrow syntax. The grammar as a whole, including interface components in addition to narrow syntax, as well as recursive interaction among subderivations, is vastly more complicated than a finite-state grammar, but there is no reason for concluding that narrow syntax is not simply finite-state.

Reviewed by: Cyclical change Agnes Jäger Cyclical change. Ed. by Elly van Gelderen. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 146.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. viii, 329. ISBN 9789027255297. $149 (Hb). Language change occasionally shows reoccurring developments or cycles: an item is gradually reduced and disappears, being replaced by a new item that undergoes the same fate. A prototypical and well-studied case of this type of change is the development of negative markers known as Jespersen's cycle (Jespersen 1917), but cyclical change is found in many other domains of syntax as well, as the volume Cyclical change demonstrates. It contains twelve papers from a workshop on cyclical change held at Arizona State University in April 2008. The introduction by Elly van Gelderen presents a synthesis of all of the papers in relation to central theoretical questions on cyclical change, including typical steps in a cycle, differences in speed, the role of the structural position of the item to be reanalyzed, and the relation of cyclical change to her theory of feature economy (van Gelderen 2004). Jack Hoeksema's 'Jespersen recycled' forms the first of four papers on Jespersen's cycle in Part 1, 'Negatives'. Drawing on English, German, and Dutch data, Hoeksema investigates negative polarity items, notably minimizers, as a source for new negators. He suggests that these turn into negative markers only if they mostly cooccur with the negative particle. Johan van der Auwera's 'The Jespersen cycles' is a meta-paper on the negative cycle, comparing different theoretical accounts and data from the literature. Van der Auwera concludes that instead of one uniform development, there are several Jespersen cycles: they basically differ as to which element loses its emphatic meaning at which stage. In 'The negative cycle in Early and Modern Russian', Olena Tsurska investigates feature changes underlying the development of Russian from a nonstrict to a strict negative concord language, that is, from only postverbal negative indefinites always cooccurring with the negative particle ne to obligatory cooccurrence of all negative indefinites with ne. Theresa Biberauer discusses developments of negation beyond Jespersen's cycle in 'Jespersen off course? The case of contemporary Afrikaans negation'. While Afrikaans employs two negative particles, no development toward replacement of nie1 by clause-final nie2 can be observed due to the origin of nie2 as a tag-negator. Independent developments are underway in Colloquial Afrikaans in clauses containing negative indefinites. Part 2, 'Pronouns, agreement and topic markers', begins with Diana Vedovato's 'Weak pronouns in Italian: Instances of a broken cycle'. She argues that the remains of weak subject pronouns in Italian, viz. 3rd person egli, esso, and dative loro, are due to prescriptive regulation that breaks the cycle of pronouns developing from strong to weak to clitic to agreement markers. Kyongjoon Kwon investigates 'The subject cycle of pronominal auxiliaries in Old North Russian', during which the former 'be'-auxiliary was reanalyzed as a strong pronoun. He contends that this kind of development forms an important step to be added in van Gelderen's (2004) subject cycle. In 'Two instances of a broken cycle: Sentential particles in Old Italian', Cecilia Poletto [End Page 430] explains that, as a consequence of the loss of verb movement into the focus domain of a split CP, the Italian sentential particles e and sì became restricted to cases where a full CP is still projected, and changed in function by adjusting to the changed syntactic structure around them. In Part 3, 'Copulas, auxiliaries and adpositions', Terje Lohndal's chapter, 'The copula cycle', explores the grammaticalization of copulas from demonstrative/personal pronouns or verbs (e.g. 'to remain/stay/stand') in various non-Indo-European languages, adopting van Gelderen's (2004) economy principles. These lead to changes not only in narrow syntax but also at LF, as Remus Gergel demonstrates in 'Rather: On a modal cycle'. As the implicature from 'earlier/faster' to 'preferred/more likely' becomes part of the lexical semantics of rather, part of the LF is erased, and the high position that rather used to reach by LF movement (quantifier raising (QR)) is...

Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, following Hale and Keyser 1993, assumes that θ-roles are assigned in a certain structural configuration at logical form (LF), to be referred to as the configurational theory of θ-role licensing (CTTL). This approach eliminates the relevance of argument (θ-) structure within narrow syntax (NS), thus rendering D-structure superfluous. This study examines how argument (θ-) structure and other base properties (traditionally associated with D-structure) are captured, without D-structure, in minimalism. While Chomsky advocates the CTTL, θ-theory appears to covertly play a crucial role in NS: the properties associated with D-structure are not fully subsumed under LF. Hence, the base properties cannot be fully assumed by the conceptual-intentional interface.

This paper presents analyses of contact effects and non-effects in later Anglo-Norman (A-N), a child L2 variety probably acquired in an immersion scenario from about age 5. Analyses are presented of a range of linguistic variables in which contact influence on A-N from English could have taken place in the form of divergence from mainstream Old French towards discrete formal patterns existing in the L1, Middle English. Results show a remarkable split between heavy contact effects in phonology, and extremely limited contact effects in syntax. Anglo-Norman lost vowel contrasts from Old French not attested in Middle English and did not gain new phonemic patterns entering later Old French. In formal syntax, however, it showed virtually no influence from English, as regards word order and grammatical category distinctions, and followed French syntactic innovations. Some contact influence from English nevertheless appeared where syntax interfaced with semantics, specifically in negation and aspectual distinctions. The contrast observed between such contact effects at the syntax-semantics interface, and the resistance to contact influence of ‘narrow syntax’, comports with similar contact (non-)effects on Judeo-Spanish.

Mayan historical linguistic research has progressed at a healthy pace since the 1970s. The recent decipherment of ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing and the publication, in the last decade, of a large cohort of high quality linguistic descriptions of several Mayan languages, many of them written by native speakers of those languages, have opened a floodgate of new linguistic data that promises to revolutionize our understanding of the history of the language family. In particular, recent research has shown the Mayan region to have been a remarkably dynamic zone of language contact. Contact among Mayan languages has the potential to illuminate mechanisms and constraints on language contact between related languages. New data and attention to contact phenomena may also help clarify long‐standing disagreements about the historical relationships among Mayan languages, particularly Wastek, Tojol‐ab’al, and the language of the hieroglyphs, all of which have been an important impetus for historical linguistic research in the past decades.

This paper examines the growth of folk zoological life‐form categories (e.g., “fish,” “bird,” “snake”) in the Mayan language family of Mesoamerica. Lexical reconstruction indicates the addition of zoological lite‐forms over time. Proto‐Mayan, spoken 4000 years ago, possessed only one life‐form, “snake,” while all contemporary Mayan languages have at least three terms—“snake,” “bird,” and “fish.” The findings of this study support a zoological life‐form encoding sequence proposed on the basis of synchronic language evidence (Brown 1979a). Positive correlation of the encoding sequence with societal complexity implies (1) that the sequence is basically additive or cumulative in nature, and (2) that earlier language states generally had fewer animal life‐forms than later states. Both of these implications are supported by the present investigation. This paper also treats systematic ways in which Mayan languages have acquired folk zoological life‐forms, continuing the investigation of principles of biological nomenclatural development begun by Berlin (1972). [cognitive anthropology, ethnozoology, folk classification, language change, language universals, Mayan languages]

This paper deals with the trigger of V-to-T movement and claims that rich morphology is the actual cause of verb-raising as occurring in core or narrow syntax. After rejecting a gross analysis of φ–features and/or τ–features as the cause of V-to-T, it is argued that the trigger of V-to-T lies in a stem-feature that T must value, which corresponds morphologically with the so-called thematic or stem vowel, and which is responsible for the availability (in V-moving languages) of productive stem verb classes. The relevant productivity lies in the systematic co-variation of φ–features and/or τ–features throughout the verbal paradigms of corresponding languages. The account proposed of the computation of T´s features in core or narrow syntax (among which is the cited T´s stem-feature) is based originally on Pesetsky and Torrego´s (2004b/2007) idea that T´s features can be interpretable though unvalued on T itself. The last Sections of the paper focus on the loss of V-to-T in the Germanic family of languages, which correlates with the demise in their productive stem verb classes. In the specific case of English, it is argued that the process of development of the new auxiliary do, which in turn depends on the reanalysis of modals, is responsible for the time-gap existing between the loss of T´s stem-feature and the loss of V-to-T in the language.

A long tradition takes word order differences within one and the same language and across languages to be a consequence of movement. More recently Chomsky has made the suggestion that, given the architecture of UG, movement in narrow syntax should have interpretive effects at both interfaces (LF and PF). Any putative movement that has an effect on the PF side but no effect on the LF side should thus be expunged from narrow syntax, with the consequence that any word order difference devoid of LF effects should be confined to the PF interface. This requires an algorithm at PF that converts hierarchical structures to linear order. To assume as an algorithm the apparent fact that the physics of speech leaves just two options (a head either precedes or follows its complements) seems far from being sufficient in that it falls short of accounting for a number of linear order generalizations. Here it is argued that some meaningless movement must be assumed if we want to capture these generalizations and provide a theory of externalization based on the Linear Correspondence Axiom, an algorithm compatible with these generalizations.

Language as a means of communication requires knowledge that studies the right order of words so listeners can capture meaning without confusion. The science of syntax is present to help further learning about the order of conjunctions, especially coordinative conjunctions. This research is useful to expand knowledge about how coordinative conjunctions are used in speech texts. The purpose of this research is to analy Language as a means of communication requires knowledge that studies the right order of words so listeners can capture meaning without confusion. The science of syntax is present to help further learning about the order of conjunctions, especially coordinative conjunctions. This research is useful to expand knowledge about how coordinative conjunctions are used in speech texts. The purpose of this research is to analyze the types of coordinative conjunctions used in Prabowo Subianto's speech texts. The research object was based on the research needs and the use of coordinative conjunctions in his speeches to be analyzed and classified in depth. The data source was taken from news.detik.com publication on April 24, 2024, in the form of text. Qualitative descriptive approach and syntactical approach were chosen as the theoretical approach. The author obtained the data by reading the object of research and then identified it, so that the listening and recording techniques were used in this research. The agih method was used to analyze the text. The data were presented using formal and informal methods with 67 coordinative conjunctions used by Prabowo Subianto, namely "and" 40 times, "with" 9 times, "or" 1 time, "but" 2 times, "only" 3 times, "even" 1 time, "namely" 1 time, "that" 6 times, "is" 1 time, and "so" 3 times. Coordinative conjunctions play an important role in building text cohesion and the effectiveness of delivering political messages. This research highlights the role of coordinative conjunctions in oral political discourse, especially in the rhetoric of national leadership. The findings strengthen the theory of text cohesion while showing its application in political situations, with an interdisciplinary approach that combines linguistics and political communication science. ze the types of coordinative conjunctions used in Prabowo Subianto's speech texts. The research object was based on the research needs and the use of coordinative conjunctions in his speeches to be analyzed and classified in depth. The data source was taken from news.detik.com publication on April 24, 2024, in the form of text. Qualitative descriptive approach and syntactical approach were chosen as the theoretical approach. The author obtained the data by reading the object of research and then identified it, so that the listening and recording techniques were used in this research. The agih method was used to analyze the text. The data were presented using formal and informal methods with 67 coordinative conjunctions used by Prabowo Subianto, namely "and" 40 times, "with" 9 times, "or" 1 time, "but" 2 times, "only" 3 times, "even" 1 time, "namely" 1 time, "that" 6 times, "is" 1 time, and "so" 3 times. Coordinative conjunctions play an important role in building text cohesion and the effectiveness of delivering political messages. This research highlights the role of coordinative conjunctions in oral political discourse, especially in the rhetoric of national leadership. The findings strengthen the theory of text cohesion while showing its application in political situations, with an interdisciplinary approach that combines linguistics and political communication science.