Barbara Pfeiler
List of John Benjamins publications for which Barbara Pfeiler plays a role.
Articles
2017. The acquisition of action nouns in Yucatec Maya. Lexical Polycategoriality: Cross-linguistic, cross-theoretical and language acquisition approaches, Vapnarsky, Valentina and Edy Veneziano (eds.), pp. 443–466
The fact that ergative-absolutive inflectional morphology applies to nouns as well as to verbs in Yucatec Maya obscures the boundary between nouns and verbs, and makes it difficult for children to acquire the distinction between them. Acquisition is particularly difficult for the category of action… read more | Chapter
2013. The acquisition of agreement in four
Mayan languages. The Acquisition of Ergativity, Bavin, Edith L. and Sabine Stoll (eds.), pp. 271–306
This paper presents results of a comparative project documenting the development of verbal agreement inflections in children learning four different Mayan languages: K’iche’, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek. These languages have similar inflectional paradigms: they have a generally agglutinative… read more | Article
2013. The acquisition of extended ergativity in Mam, Q’anjob’al and Yucatec. The Acquisition of Ergativity, Bavin, Edith L. and Sabine Stoll (eds.), pp. 307–336
Ergativity in Mayan languages is realized in the cross-referencing features on verbs rather than as case marking features on noun phrases. Overt absolutive markers appear with intransitive verbs. Some Mayan languages extend the ergative markers to intransitive verbs in aspectless complement clauses. read more | Article