International Journal of American Linguistics

The morpheme wal in Yucatec Maya is regarded informally as an epistemic modal, often translated with words like English ‘might’ or ‘maybe’. In this paper, we consider the use of wal across a broader range of environments, arguing for a complex picture of wal as a discourse particle as well as its interactions with other factors. First, we show that the semantic effect of wal differs systematically depending on its intonational realization. Second, we show that both intonational variants of wal are felicitous across a wide variety of sentence types, not just declaratives. Overall, we present an analysis in which stressed and unstressed variants of wal interact with different sentence types in principled ways to produce a range of apparent effects. Beyond furthering our understanding of these various elements in Yucatec Maya, the resulting picture contributes to our growing cross-linguistic understanding of discourse particles and their interactions with intonation.

This paper presents a detailed morphosyntactic investigation of free relative clauses (FRs) in Kiksht, an Indigenous Native North American Language spoken at the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon. A type of headless relative clause, FRs are embedded clauses that bear formal affinity to wh‑ interrogative clauses yet carry no interrogative meaning and distribute like arguments and adjuncts. Two FR types are attested in Kiksht: maximal FRs, which behave like definite expressions, and existential FRs, which behave like indefinites. A third type of non-interrogative clause is also discussed, which is similar to a free-choice FR but also bears likeness to wh‑ correlatives and wh‑ conditionals. All FR types in Kiksht are formally indistinct, their type and meaning being contextually determined. Kiksht free relatives are also unlike headed relative clauses in the language. Typologically, orienting to Kiksht is relevant because there is little documentation of FRs in Indigenous Native North American languages.

In some Central Zapotec varieties, such as San Pablo Güilá Zapotec and Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec, a verb in the completive aspect undergoes a tone change in certain syntactic contexts. We argue that this phenomenon can be accounted for by considering that there are two completive prefixes, the segmental exponents of which are the same: one that does not provoke any tone change (completive) and the other that does (completive 2). We also propose that this tone change can be considered as an instance of a grammatical tone, especially the nondominant grammatical tone, where the grammatical tone interacts with the lexical tone of its host. The phenomenon discussed in this paper is of interest because the interaction of syntax and tone has not been studied in detail in Zapotec or more generally in Otomanguean languages.

This article proposes that verbs in Matlatzinca (Otomian; Oto-Pamean; Oto-Manguean) fall into five inflectional classes, which the authors call ‘conjugations’. The article focuses on the forms that make up the paradigms of these five classes. The conjugations of Matlatzinca are based on inflectional constructs that are largely periphrastic in composition, which means that the exponents in the constructions are not prefixes but behave like prosodic words, independent from the lexical stem of the verb being inflected. However, such exponents are not verbal auxiliaries but grammatical markers. We also show that class membership of the conjugations is determined by transitivity value. Three of the classes contain only transitive verbs, while the two remaining ones contain only intransitive verbs. One of the intransitive conjugations contains middle verbs. Transitive verbs are inflected as members of this middle class to obtain passive or middle voice readings. Wherever possible, the constructions are illustrated with examples from natural speech.

This paper discusses a specific use of two movement verbs meaning ‘come’ in folk tales in the Poqomchi’ (Mayan) language. It is argued that these verbs establish and maintain the deictic structure of the text-internal narrative world. The verb chalik ‘come (here)’ indicates the character that is located in the deictic center of an episode, while the verb ponik ‘come (there)’ introduces temporal expressions, which set the time reference. When performing these specific discursive functions, both verbs lose their lexical meaning and do not contribute to the narrative content itself, thus differing from other deictic center devices that are available to Poqomchi’ speakers. This peculiarity of narrative discourse in Poqomchi’ is a result of the consistent development of the general tendency to mark episode boundaries by means of movement verbs, which has been noted for several Mayan languages.