Course Description
The Mayan language family includes about 30 languages spoken today by more than six million people in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Mayan languages share a number of grammatical characteristics, including basic verb-initial word order, morphological ergativity marked via agreement, and rich derivational morphology. Despite a number of shared properties, Mayan languages also show important points of variation. This, together with the growing body of documentary and theoretical literature, makes them an excellent place to investigate microvariation. In this course we will examine several topics in the structure of languages of the Mayan family, with an eye toward their relevance to linguistic theory more generally. Topics covered will include ergativity and split ergativity; argument structure; verb-initial word order; and ergative extraction asymmetries.
Area Tags: Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, Typology, Variation, Language Documentation
(Session 1) Tuesday/Friday 1:30pm – 2:50pm
Location: ILC S331
Instructor: Jessica Coon
Jessica Coon is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages. Her research is focused on variation across human languages, specifically in the domains of syntax and morphology. Coon’s research focuses primarily on understudied Indigenous languages of the Americas, especially the Mayan languages Ch’ol and Chuj, though she has also had the opportunity to work with Mi’gmaq, an Algonquian language of eastern Canada. In syntax, her interests include ergativity, split ergativity, case and agreement systems, hierarchy effects, extraction asymmetries, nominalization, and verb-initial word order. In addition to human languages, Jessica Coon has had the chance to think about what it might be like to work with aliens through her role consulting for the film “Arrival.”
