Encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya : on the Interplay of prosody and syntax

The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production

Animacy shift and layers of nominal structure

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Peer Reviewe

Thematic Asymmetries Do Matter! A Corpus Study of German Word Order

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*Peer Reviewe

Distinctness effects on VOS order: Evidence from Yucatec Maya

Skopeteas S, Verhoeven E. Distinctness effects on VOS order: Evidence from Yucatec Maya. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. 2009;59(New Perspectives in Mayan Linguistics):135-152

Tiers for Fears and Other Emotions: A Cross-Linguistic Approach to Psych Lexis and Syntax

A central issue in the comparative study of any linguistic category and its patterns is the necessity of choosing specific exponents in the target languages. This is particularly relevant for lexical domains rendering subjective and highly culturally informed phenomena such as emotions. We propose an alternative to the common solution of translating from English via native speaker inquiry and/or dictionaries. Elaborating upon current methodology in typological studies, we devised a systematic elicitation task which incorporates insights from cross-cultural psychological and anthropological research on human emotions. Our method facilitates the elicitation of extensive comparable inventories of emotion lexemes, many of which lack straightforward English equivalents and thus could not have been captured by a traditional translation-based approach. We show that this method can be used to investigate specific structural phenomena such as the psych alternation from a cross-linguistic perspective while minimizing translational bias

Word Order Acceptability and Word Order Choice

Previous work has shown that the relation between acceptability ratings and frequencies in speech production is exponential. The present study examines the relation between preference ratings and frequencies of choice with a maximally controlled design, using the same material with two experimental procedures, namely a split-100 rating and a forced-choice task. The phenomenon examined is the choice between SO and OS order in German clauses with canonical and experiencer-object verbs in different contexts. The acceptability of the alternative orders under these conditions was obtained by the split-100 rating task. We assumed that the candidate that appears in speech production is the winner of the competition between SO and OS order based on their acceptability in a given condition. The results of the forced-choice task show that the relation between ratings and choice is not just linear, but can be better approximated by higher-order polynomials: the greater the distance between the acceptability values of the alternative candidates, the stronger the bias for the winner candidate

Licensing Focus Constructions in Yucatec Maya

Verhoeven E, Skopeteas S. Licensing Focus Constructions in Yucatec Maya. International Journal of American Linguistics. 2015;81(1):1-40.An important challenge in the study of focus constructions is teasing out the properties of the layers of linguistic structure that are involved, in particular identifying which interpretational properties are associated with the syntactic operation at issue, which properties arise through inferential processes, and which properties can be deduced on the basis of the prosodic structure. This article undertakes this challenge in a language with a structurally identifiable left-peripheral position which is employed for the expression of focus, namely, Yucatec Maya. This syntactic configuration comes with a focus interpretation and we show that the occurrence of this construction is not restricted to a subtype of focus corresponding to a truth-conditionally relevant operator. The properties of the syntax-prosody mapping indicate that focus fronting is a syntactic operation that places the material in focus in the maximally prominent partition of the prosodic constituent that contains the predicate

Discourse-Independent Variation in V-Initial Constituent Order: The Yucatec Mayan Preverbal Domain Revisited

Contribution to Linguistic Evidence 202

Zur Typologie der sprachlichen Repräsentation konzeptueller Relation

2., rev. ed

Chocó languages

Murillo Miranda JM, Skopeteas S. Chocó languages. In: Quesada JD, Verhoeven E, eds. Handbook of Central American Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Submitted