Tradiciones, paradigmas y escuelas

After “discovering” a New World at the end of the 15th century, missionaries soon began to produce grammars of the languages spoken there. It can be said that ‘missionary linguistics’ was born and thus the nature of the American languages was becoming known. In this paper the author proposes to analyse a corpus of fifty-six grammars from Mesoamerica, i.e., the central region of the American continent. In the analysis, the author distinguishes five schools according to the established religious orders in New Spain: Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit, Augustinian, and the secular Church. Although the grammars written in these schools are almost exclusively based on the Latin tradition, many of them contain innovative descriptions of the specific structures found in these Mesoamerican languages.