The Acquisition of Mayan Morphosyntax

Abstract

This paper assesses predictions for the acquisition of Mayan verbal inflections derived from structural, comparative and metrical theories. The structuralist theory of Wexler (1998) fails to predict K'iche' (Kiche) children's use of the language's agreement morphology and existential verb. A comparison of verbal inflection across the Mayan languages successfully predicts the children's early use of the status suffixes on verbs, but fails to predict the relative acquisition of the ergative and absolutive agreement affixes. Demuth's metrical theory (1994) is the most successful of these three models in predicting the course of language development in K'iche' It is the only model that can explain why children would break morphemes along syllable boundaries as well as combine separate inflections into a single unit of production.