Full Description
This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.
Contents
1. Preface & acknowledgements; 2. List of abbreviations; 3. Chapter 1. Language contact in the Maya Lowlands; 4. Chapter 2. Mayan languages and linguistic areas: Areal phonology; 5. Chapter 3. Mayan languages and linguistic areas: Syntactic, semantic and morphological features; 6. Chapter 4. Person marking and pattern borrowing in Lowland Mayan languages; 7. Chapter 5. Cholan, Yukatekan and matter borrowing in person markers; 8. Chapter 6. Contact effects in the Lowland Mayan aspectual systems: Direct borrowing; 9. Chapter 7. Pattern borrowing and split ergativity; 10. Chapter 8. Secondary contact effects; 11. Chapter 9. Language ideology and contact; 12. Chapter 10. Conclusions: Contact among related languages; 13. References; 14. Index
