<em>The syntax of non-verbal predication in Yucatec Maya</em>

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to fill a void in the formal syntactic literature on Mayan languages by proposing a syntactic structure for clauses with non-verbal predicates in Yucatec Maya. The paper attempts to integrate the rich descriptions of non-verbal predicate constructions found in more functionally-oriented accounts (Lehmann 2002 [1998]; Verhoeven 2007; Vapnarsky 2013) with insights from the generative literature on argument licensing and clause structure in Mayan languages (Coon 2016 for an overview) as well as small clauses (Citko 2011 for an overview). I conclude that non-verbal sentences in Yucatec are matrix small clauses embedded under an Infl node, which is the locus for finiteness/stative aspect rather than tense morphology. This simple structure, coupled with independently motivated operations that have been proposed for small clauses and argument licensing/word order in Mayan languages, is able to account for a range of properties of these sentences that improves upon previous accounts developed in Armstrong (2010), Pye (2011) and Coon (2014).

Original received: 2016/07/13

Review sent to author: 2016/11/11

Accepted: 2017/05/03