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Topic and Focus in Mayan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Judith L. Aissen
Judith L. Aissen*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
*
Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
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Abstract

Most Mayan languages are ‘basically’ predicate-initial, but various phrases occur before the predicate when they are focussed or topicalized. This paper assumes the framework of Chomsky 1986 and presents a phrase-structural analysis of topic and focus for three Mayan languages (Tzotzil, Jakaltek, Tz'utujil). Three distinct entities are distinguished: the focus and two types of topic, termed here ‘internal’ and ‘external’. Each is argued to occupy a distinct structural position. At the heart of the analysis is an account of intonational phrasing and the distribution of several intonational phrase clitics in Tzotzil and Jakaltek. An algorithm is proposed for deriving intonational phrase structure from surface structure. Syntactic evidence further supports the phrase-structural differences established on prosodic grounds.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 43 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This paper owes much to the observations and scrutiny of Jon Dayley, Tom Larsen, and an anonymous reviewer for Language. Thanks also to Sandy Chung, Armin Mester, and Paul Postal for comments on an earlier version of the paper and to Jim McCloskey for on-going discussion of the issues raised here. I owe special thanks to Manvel Peres and Chep Hernantis Kontzares, both of the municipality of Zinacantán (Chiapas, Mexico), for their help with the Tzotzil data. Parts of this paper were presented in earlier versions at a special session of the Berkeley Linguistics Society and at UC Santa Barbara.

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