790 Pages
    by Routledge

    790 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras.



    This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken.



    The Mayan Languages:







    • provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family;






    • includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script;






    • provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages;






    • includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts.




    Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.

    Chapter 1: Introduction



    Judith Aissen, Nora C. England, Roberto Zavala Maldonado





    Part 1: Language Development, History, and Change



    Chapter 2: Mayan Language Acquisition



    Clifton Pye, Barbara Pfeiler, Pedro Mateo Pedro





    Chapter 3: Mayan History and Comparison



    Lyle Campbell





    Chapter 4: Aspects of the Lexicon of proto-Mayan and its Earliest Descendants



    Terrence Kaufman





    Chapter 5: Language Contacts with(in) Mayan



    Danny Law





    Chapter 6: Classic Mayan: An Overview of Language in Ancient Hieroglyphic Script



    Danny Law and David Stuart





    Part 2: Grammar



    Chapter 7: Phonology and Phonetics



    Nora C. England and Brandon O. Baird





    Chapter 8: Morphology



    Gilles Polian





    Chapter 9: Alignment Patterns



    Roberto Zavala Maldonado





    Chapter 10: Complement Clauses



    Judith Aissen





    Chapter 11: Information Structure in Mayan



    Judith Aissen





    Part 3: Semantics



    Chapter 12: Organization of Space



    Jürgen Bohnemeyer





    Chapter 13: Focus, Interrogation, and Indefinites



    Scott AnderBois





    Chapter 14: Pluractionality in Mayan



    Robert Henderson





    Part 4: Language in Context



    Chapter 15: The Labyrinth of Diversity: the Sociolinguistics of Mayan Languages Sergio Romero





    Chapter 16: Mayan Conversation and Interaction



    John B. Haviland





    Chapter 17: Poetics



    Rusty Barrett





    Part 5: Grammar Sketches



    Chapter 18:

    Biography



    Judith Aissen is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.





    Nora C. England is Dallas TACA Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also Director of the Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas at Austin.





    Roberto Zavala Maldonado is Researcher and Professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico. He was also Joint-Director of the Project for the Documentation of Languages of Meso-America.