Language Contact, Inherited Similarity and Social Difference
The story of linguistic interaction in the Maya lowlands
Author
This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 328] 2014. xi, 206 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Preface & acknowledgements | pp. ix–x
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List of abbreviations | pp. xi–xii
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Chapter 1. Language contact in the Maya Lowlands | pp. 1–30
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Chapter 2. Mayan languages and linguistic areas: Areal phonology | pp. 31–46
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Chapter 3. Mayan languages and linguistic areas: Syntactic, semantic and morphological features | pp. 47–72
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Chapter 4. Person marking and pattern borrowing in Lowland Mayan languages | pp. 73–96
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Chapter 5. Cholan, Yukatekan and matter borrowing in person markers | pp. 97–108
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Chapter 6. Contact effects in the Lowland Mayan aspectual systems: Direct borrowing | pp. 109–128
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Chapter 7. Pattern borrowing and split ergativity | pp. 129–142
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Chapter 8. Secondary contact effects | pp. 143–156
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Chapter 9. Language ideology and contact | pp. 157–174
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Chapter 10. Conclusions: Contact among related languages | pp. 175–186
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References
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Index | pp. 205–206
“[This monograph] explores old ideas and advances new ones that contribute to the theory of contact-induced borrowing. It is a reservoir of concepts that will long be cited by Mayanists and by theorists of language contact alike.”
John S. Robertson, Brigham Young University, in Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 57:1 (2015)
“Law analyzes language contact between lowland Mayan languages, demonstrating that the study of contact between related languages is not only possible, but that such studies have important implications for understanding language contact more broadly. [...] Indeed, such research may reveal patterns that are quite different from those typically found in research on contact between unrelated languages. In addition to providing a unique and interesting case study, the book challenges a number of common assumptions within the field and makes a major theoretical contribution to the study of language contact.”
Rusty Barret, University of Kentucky, in Journal of Language Contact Vol. 2016, pp. 1-3
Cited by 22 other publications
Bennett, Ryan
2016. Mayan phonology. Language and Linguistics Compass 10:10 ► pp. 469 ff. 
Bennett, Ryan, Jessica Coon & Robert Henderson
2016. Introduction to Mayan Linguistics. Language and Linguistics Compass 10:10 ► pp. 455 ff.
Bennett, Ryan, Boris Harizanov & Robert Henderson
2018. Prosodic Smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel. Linguistic Inquiry 49:2 ► pp. 195 ff.
Cole, Marcelle
Dakin, Karen & Natalie Operstein
2017. Chapter 1. Language contact in Mesoamerica and beyond. In Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 185], ► pp. 1 ff.
Hakimov, Nikolay & Michael Rießler
2021. Partial fusion in long-term bilingualism: The case of vernacular Kildin Saami. International Journal of Bilingualism 25:2 ► pp. 401 ff.
Heaton, Raina
2021. Chapter 17. Antipassive and antipassive-like constructions in Mayan languages. In Antipassive [Typological Studies in Language, 130], ► pp. 549 ff.
Hickey, Raymond
2020. Language Contact and Linguistic Research. In The Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 1 ff.
Law, Danny
2020. Pattern borrowing, linguistic similarity, and new categories: Numeral classifiers in Mayan. Morphology 30:4 ► pp. 347 ff.
2020. Contact and Mayan Languages. In The Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 613 ff.
Law, Danny, John Robertson, Stephen Houston, Marc Zender & David Stuart
2014. AREAL SHIFTS IN CLASSIC MAYAN PHONOLOGY. Ancient Mesoamerica 25:2 ► pp. 357 ff.
McKinnon, Sean
2020. Un análisis sociofonético de la aspiración de las oclusivas sordas en el español guatemalteco monolingüe y bilingüe
(español-kaqchikel). Spanish in Context 17:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Munson, Jessica, Jonathan Scholnick, Matthew Looper, Yuriy Polyukhovych & Martha J. Macri
2016. Ritual Diversity and Divergence of Classic Maya Dynastic Traditions: A Lexical Perspective on Within-Group Cultural Variation. Latin American Antiquity 27:1 ► pp. 74 ff.
Muysken, Pieter
2022. Reconstructing the Sociolinguistic History of Expansion Languages in the Americas: A Research Program. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 344 ff.
Rodríguez‐Ordóñez, Itxaso
2019. The role of linguistic ideologies in language contact situations. Language and Linguistics Compass 13:10
Tada, Mitsuhiro
2018. Language, ethnicity, and the nation-state: on Max Weber’s conception of “imagined linguistic community”. Theory and Society 47:4 ► pp. 437 ff.
Vinogradov, Igor
2017. From enclitic to prefix: diachrony of personal absolutive markers in Q’eqchi’. Morphology 27:1 ► pp. 105 ff.
2019. The history of the Poqomchi’ language description. Language & History 62:1 ► pp. 14 ff.
2022. Evangelization and Language Change: A Transition from the Progressive Aspect to the Future Tense in Two Mayan Languages. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:3 ► pp. 375 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. Contact, Emergence, and Language Classification. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 255 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects & Metadata
Linguistics
BIC Subject: CFF – Historical & comparative linguistics
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General