POSITIONAL VERBS IN COLONIAL VALLEY ZAPOTEC

This paper describes the system of positional verbs (e.g., ‘be standing’ and ‘be lying’) in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ), a historical form of Valley Zapotec preserved in archival documents written during the Mexican colonial period. We provide data showing that positional verbs in CVZ have unique...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of American linguistics 2017-04, Vol.83 (2), p.263-305
Main Authors: Foreman, John, Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ancient civilizations
Ancient languages
Archives & records
Deception
Grammatical case
Language typology
Linguistics
Morphosyntax
Syntactic structures
Verbs
Zapotec languages
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Summary:This paper describes the system of positional verbs (e.g., ‘be standing’ and ‘be lying’) in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ), a historical form of Valley Zapotec preserved in archival documents written during the Mexican colonial period. We provide data showing that positional verbs in CVZ have unique morphological properties and participate in a defined set of syntactic constructions, showing that positional verbs formed a formal class of verbs in Valley Zapotec as early as the mid-1500s. This work contributes to the typological literature on positional verbs, demonstrating the type of morphosyntactic work that can be done with a corpus of CVZ texts, and contributes to our understanding of the structure and development of the modern Zapotec positional verb system with implications for the larger Zapotec locative system.
ISSN:0020-7071
1545-7001
DOI:10.1086/689846