Nominalization and selection in two Mayan languages

Abstract

In ‘Nominalization and selection in two Mayan languages’ Coon and Royer investigate nominalization in languages from two subbranches of the Mayan family: Ch’ol and Chuj. At the heart of this work is the tension between semantic requirements of certain roots, and the syntactic structure available to license arguments in different types and sizes of constructions. The fact that roots in Mayan belong to well-defined and diagnosable root classes, combined with the rich inventory of derivational morphology, sheds light on the division of labor between roots and functional heads in governing the appearance of nominal arguments. The authors show that roots belonging to transitive and (unaccusative) intransitive classes in Ch’ol and Chuj always require semantic saturation of an argument slot, but that this is accomplished by different means in the Mayan equivalents of the types of nominalizations examined in Chomsky 1970. They attribute this difference to the variation in the realization of the internal argument to the site of nominalization—specifically, to the presence or absence of functional heads available internal to the nominalization to syntactically license arguments.