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Deriving verb-initial word order in Mayan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
Abstract
Individual languages in the Mayan family display either rigid VSO or alternating VOS/VSO word orders (England 1991). In this article we review problems with previous accounts of Mayan word order and argue that verb-initial (V1) order is consistently derived by head movement of the verb to a position above the subject and below Infl0, which accounts for uniformity in verb-stem formation across the family. After an in-depth examination of the factors that have been reported to determine postverbal argument order, we present three distinct paths to VOS: (i) postsyntactic reordering of NP objects (following Clemens 2014, 2017), (ii) right-side subject topicalization (Can Pixabaj 2004, Curiel 2007), and (iii) heavy-NP shift (Larsen 1988). This account makes testable predictions in the domains of word order and prosodic constituency and has implications for the derivation of verb-initial order crosslinguistically.
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- Copyright © 2018 Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
*
We are extremely grateful to Morelia Vázquez Martínez, Virginia Martínez Vázquez, Nicolás Arcos López, and Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez for Ch'ol data and discussion, and to Pedro Mateo Pedro and B'alam Mateo Toledo for Q'anjob'al. For reading and commenting on previous versions of this article, we thank Judith Aissen, Scott AnderBois, John Beavers, Nora England, Vera Gribanova, and Robert Henderson, and three referees. Many thanks also to Grant Armstrong, Ryan Bennett, George Aaron Broadwell, Michael Diercks, Jaime Douglas, Emily Elfner, Heidi Harley, Caitlin Keenan, David Pesetsky, Omer Preminger, Nina Radke-vich, Rodrigo Ranero, Stuart Robinson, Michelle Sheehan, Gary Thoms, Joey Windsor, and audiences at FAMLi 3, SSILA 2015, WSCLA 2016, NELS 2016, and CILLA 2017 for helpful comments and discussion at various stages of this work. Special thanks to Justin Royer for research assistance.
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