Privative constructions in Mesoamerica: How do languages without ‘without’ actually function?

Abstract

Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely borrowing the Spanish preposition sin, the use of regular negative constructions, including negative existential and copulative constructions, and developing functionally restricted markers for particular semantic domains (body parts, clothes, and so forth). The fact that Mesoamerican languages are averse to the use of negative comitative or instrumental constructions supports that privatives have a more complex semantic nature than a simple negation of possession, existence, or comitativity. A notable similarity in the privative constructions employed in Mesoamerica and in the languages to the north reflects the linguistic relationship between Mesoamerica and the American Southwest.