Abstract
We use the comparative method of language acquisition research in this article to investigate children’s expression of directional clitics in two Eastern Mayan languages – K’iche’ and Mam (Pye and Pfeiler, 2014; Pye, 2017). The comparative method in historical linguistics reconstructs the grammatical antecedents of modern languages and traces the evolution of each linguistic feature (Paul, 1889; Campbell, 1998). This history informs research on language acquisition by demonstrating how phonological and morphological features interact in the evolution of new uses for common inherited traits. Children acquiring modern languages must learn the arbitrary constraints imposed on their language by its history.
Highlights
The Eastern branch of the Mayan language family contains 13 languages including K’iche’, Mam, Ixil, Tz’utujil, Kaqchikel, and Poqomchi’
We examine the acquisition of directional clitics that K’iche’ and Mam use to express the direction an agent takes in the course of accomplishing an event
The directional particles can receive the primary stress for the verb phrase, and we found evidence that 2-year-old K’iche’ children produce the post-verbal directional clitics in their speech
Summary
The Eastern branch of the Mayan language family contains 13 languages including K’iche’, Mam, Ixil, Tz’utujil, Kaqchikel, and Poqomchi’. Verb complexes in Mayan languages mark a fundamental division in transitivity Both K’iche’ and Mam have distinct sets of absolutive and ergative person markers. CMP = ABS4-go-sleep-DEPIV ‘We went to sleep.’ These examples show that the K’iche’ directional -ee ‘go’ and the Mam directional -tzaj ‘come’ are placed after the aspect and absolutive markers and before the verb, if intransitive (3a), or before the ergative subject marker if the verb is transitive (3b). Unlike the preverbal directional clitics, the post-verbal directional clitics do not trigger the use of the dependent status suffix on the main verb. The absence of an aspect marker to host the directional clitics on imperative verbs in Mam triggers the movement of the directional clitics to a post-verbal position.
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