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The Evolution of the Pronominal System from Common Mayan to Modern Yucatecan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

John S. Robertson
John S. Robertson*
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University
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Abstract

A drastic restructuring of the Common Mayan system of pronouns resulted in the Modern Yucatecan pronominal system. This restructuring involved, first of all, a paradigmatic regularization of new, formerly non-existent grammatical categories.

The restructuring was internally constrained by the hierarchy of the pronominal system itself. The organizing laws which shaped the Mayan system are (a) the well-known theorem of Huntington 1904 that ‘the number of elements in every logical field must be 2m‘ and (b) a constraint on the theorem provided by the Peircean notion of SYMBOL (as against ICON). Grammatical systems of a more SYMBOLIC character formally distinguish relatively fewer 2m spaces. Common Mayan, which was a symbolic system, made fewer distinctions in the logical field of its pronominal system than do the modern, Yucatecan reflexes of that system.

Information

Type
From Symbol to Icon
Information
Language , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , September 1983, pp. 529 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 by Linguistic Society of America

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