BARBARA PFEILER

... p. 12). o en: ...que viene como el Ave Fénix, a resur-gir entre sus cenizas el idioma maya, para muchos, IDIOMA MUERTO pe-ro para nosotros VIVO porque lo hablan más del 80% de los hablantes de la Península Yucateca, abrigamos una fe inquebrantable que cristalizará ...

Les As. proposent une analyse preliminaire concernant les premiers developpements de l'acquisition, par un enfant, de la flexion verbale du yucatec, une langue maya ergative-absolutive. Ils tentent plus particulierement d'identifier les stades pre-morphologique et proto-morphologique, ainsi que la phase de transition

... Five languages in the Maya family are the most thor-oughly studied: K'iche'(Pye 1983, 1986, 1990, 1992; Pye & Rekart 1990) and K'anjob'al (Mateo 2005), both spoken in Guatemala; and Tzeltal (Brown 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 2001), Tzotzil (de Leon Pasquel 1994, 1997 ...

Nuestro interés por la ciudad y los fenómenos sociales, económicos, territoriales, políticos y culturales que en ella se presentan se ha retroalimentado a lo largo de varios años, en distintas reuniones académicas, tales como seminarios, coloquio e incluso charlas informales. De ello surge la intención de conjuntar conocimientos de actualidad en un libro. Esta obra tiene tres ejes temáticos. El primero agrupa capítulos fundamentalmente planteados desde una óptica territorial. El siguiente eje temático es de corte fundamentalmente sociológico y tiene como referente principal a algunos actores sociales. El siguiente y último eje temático trata aspectos más de corte histórico y cultural a escala micro, a nivel de localidades periurbanas, ya sean éstas cabeceras municipales, comisarías o subcomisarias, todas ellas con un pasado rural muy reciente y con importante presencia étnica

The aim of this research was to explain the crucial factors relevant for the acquisition of person marking in Croatian and Yucatec Maya. Previous studies on the acquisition of verbs have shown a dominance of the usage of verbal morphology in the one-word and two-word utterances (Kovacevic et al. 2008). In this study we focus on how, in these two typologically different languages, subject participants emerge in children’s speech. Longitudinal data from child language corpora of both languages were analysed in a comparative way. Despite the fact that the target entities are not equivalent in these languages, person is acquired in a similar manner ; both are marked by verb inflection and periphrasis. We tested several factors which could influence the development of person verb marking: position, alignment, morphological transparency and prosodic saliency. Position has been shown to play the crucial role in the acquisition of person marking in this research since suffixation was identi...

Caretakers tend to repeat themselves when speaking to children, either to clarify their message or to redirect wandering attention. This repetition also appears to support language learning. For example, words that are heard more frequently tend to be produced earlier by young children. However, pure repetition only goes so far; some variation between utterances is necessary to support acquisition of a fully productive grammar. When individual words or morphemes are repeated, but embedded in different lexical and syntactic contexts, the child has more information about how these forms may be used and combined. Corpus analysis has shown that these partial repetitions frequently occur in clusters, which have been coined variation sets. More recent research has introduced algorithms that can extract these variation sets automatically from corpora with the goal of measuring their relative prevalence across ages and languages. Longitudinal analyses have revealed that rates of variation sets tend to decrease as children get older. We extend this research in several ways. First, we consider a maximally diverse sample of languages, both genealogically and geographically, to test the generalizability of developmental trends. Second, we compare multiple levels of repetition, both words and morphemes, to account for typological differences in how information is encoded. Third, we consider several additional measures of development to account for deficiencies in age as a measure of linguistic aptitude. Fourth, we examine whether the levels of repetition found in child-surrounding speech is greater or less than what would have been expected by chance. This analysis produced a new measure, redundancy, which captures how repetitive speech is on average given how repeititive it could have been. Fifth, we compare rates of repetition in child-surrounding and adult-directed speech to test whether variation sets are especially prevalent in child-surrounding speech. We find that (1) some languages show increases in repetition over development, (2) true estimates of variation sets are generally lower than or equal to random baselines, (3) these patterns are largely convergent across developmental indices, and (4) adult-directed speech is reliably less redundant, though in some cases more repetitive, than child-surrounding speech. These results are discussed with respect to features of the corpora, typological properties of the languages, and differential rates of change in repetition and redundancy over children's development.

Yucatec Maya lexical nouns can only be separated into groups on the basis of frequency of plural inflection or concord, that is, nouns which frequently take the suffix -o'ob either as a direct inflection or as part of the cross-referencing bound pronoun on the verb. In everyday speech the plural inflection is noticed in animate entities or to objects in one-to-one relation to an animate possessor. Singular and plural may also be signaled facultatively by a variety of specific quantitative modifiers. None of these forms either with or without numerals requires any other formal plural or singular marks in the noun phrase or the clause. Our data from Sandi (1;9 to 2;9) show the development of number marking, as well as on the nouns on animate entities, as on verbs (first observation at the age of 1;11.9). At the same time we analyze the development of the use of the numeral modifiers, because of the importance they have in indicating Singular and Plural in this language

The aim of this research was to explain the crucial factors relevant for the acquisition of person marking in Croatian and Yucatec Maya. Previous studies on the acquisition of verbs have shown a dominance of the usage of verbal morphology in the one-word and two-word utterances (Kovacevic et al. 2008). In this study we focus on how, in these two typologically different languages, subject participants emerge in children’s speech. Longitudinal data from child language corpora of both languages were analysed in a comparative way. Despite the fact that the target entities are not equivalent in these languages, person is acquired in a similar manner ; both are marked by verb inflection and periphrasis. We tested several factors which could influence the development of person verb marking: position, alignment, morphological transparency and prosodic saliency. Position has been shown to play the crucial role in the acquisition of person marking in this research since suffixation was identi...

The "Yucatec Maya Dialect Atlas" is a dataset created at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mérida, México. The data was collected between 2000 and 2007; funded by the CONACyT (funding ID: 36387-H). The data was collected in 80 different locations in the peninsula of Yucatán (n speakers = 157). Elicitation was based on a questionnaire with Spanish prompts (n = 665).

A pesar de la presencia de la lengua indigena en varios dominios publicos (especialmente en las areas de medios masivos; educacion; religion y cultura) de la Peninsula de Yucatan el numero de los hablantes monolingues de maya esta decreciendo. Los objetivos de este estudio son investigar los factores extralinguisticos que influyen en la vitalidad de la lengua maya; asi como analizar las actitudes hacia el espanol y la maya de personas bilingues. Entre los metodos para estudiar actitudes linguisticas se escogio la prueba “matched-guise” con la adaptacion de algunos conceptos del “diferencial semantico” ya que estas pruebas proporcionan datos subjetivos y subconscientes que son determinantes para la lealtad linguistica y la conciencia etnica. Este estudio se centra ante todo en la problematica de esta prueba al aplicarla en un ambiente cultural diferente al original. Se presentan tanto los factores que impidieron su aplicacion exitosa; asi como posibles soluciones a la problematica ex...

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that children produce words as binary feet. Northern Pame uses obligatory portmanteaux prefixes to inflect nouns for class, number, animacy and possessor. Singular nouns constitute 90 percent of the nouns that the children hear and yet all five two-year-old children frequently omitted the singular noun prefixes, but produced the low frequency noun suffixes for dual and animate plural. Neither the children's production of the noun-class prefixes nor their prefix overextensions correlated with the adult type and token frequencies of production. Northern Pame children constructed Minimal Words that contain binary feet and disfavor the production ...

En los censos oficiales se considera que Yucatán es el estado mexicano con el mayor grado de bilingüismo. No existe un solo municipio en Yucatán en el cual no se use el maya-yucateco. Pero al tomar en cuenta la política lingüística histórica y actual, la situación lingüística en Yucatán esta caracterizada por el fenómeno "diglosia con bilingüismo (Fishman, J97la: 75). La diglosia se manifiesta de tal manera que a nivel nacional existe una lengua dominante y oficial junto a otra lengua subordinada y no estandarizada. El desequilibrio de las dos lenguas en contacto no es resultado del racismo, sino más bien de los diferentes factores socioeconómicos y demográficos. Según la definición de Fishman (1967) predomina el bilingüismo individual en Yucatán. La diglosia en cambio, se da en el nivel sociocultural. La cuestión de hasta que grado se manifiesta esta situación lingüística es el ambiente rural del estado de Yucatán depende de los factores demográficos y económicos de cada comun...

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: Northern Pame (autonym: Xi’iuy) is an Otopamean language situated in the Mexican state of San Luís Potosí. Today over 90% of the Pame population speaks Spanish, and two-year-old children only speak Northern Pame in two Northern Pame villages. The paper explores differences in two-year-old Pame children’s production of words in Northern Pame and Spanish in order to assess the possibility that developmental constraints and/or language shift influence the form and distribution of the children’s words in the two languages. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study is based on video recordings of five Northern Pame children around the age of 2;0. The adult speakers included one father and four mothers. Four hours of production data were analyzed from each of the five children. Data and Analysis: We analyzed the following: (1) the proportion of major lexical categories; (2) the use of the Spanish copula ser in Pame; (3) the mean segmental lengt...

How does a child map words to grammatical categories when words are not overtly marked either lexically or prosodically? Recent language acquisition theories have proposed that distributional information encoded in sequences of words or morphemes might play a central role in forming grammatical classes. To test this proposal, we analyze child-directed speech from seven typologically diverse languages to simulate maximum variation in the structures of the world's languages. We ask whether the input to children contains cues for assigning syntactic categories in frequent frames, which are frequently occurring nonadjacent sequences of words or morphemes. In accord with aggregated results from previous studies on individual languages, we find that frequent word frames do not provide a robust distributional pattern for accurately predicting grammatical categories. However, our results show that frames are extremely accurate cues cross-linguistically at the morpheme level. We theorize...

This chapter compares the acquisition of nominative clitic and agreement markers in French and Spanish with the acquisition of person marking in the Mayan languages Wastek, Yukatek, Ch’ol and K’iche’. Whereas Spanish has a full nominative agreement paradigm on verbs, French relies upon pronominal clitics to mark person. Mayan languages use ergative and absolutive person markers. The acquisition data provide independent evidence for the clitic or agreement nature of the ergative and absolutive morphemes. Children acquired the ergative morphemes differently in the four Mayan languages indicating that the ergative morphemes are linguistically distinct. Only the Yukatek children’s production of the absolutive markers was similar to children’s production of agreement in Spanish. The results indicate that only absolutive agreement in Yukatek can be identified with nominative agreement in Spanish. A simple dichotomy between clitic and agreement does not explain the different production pro...

Presentamos los datos de las formas tempranas de negación en tres lenguas mayas (k’iche’, yucateco y q’anjob’al). Estas lenguas marcan diferentes contrastes entre los contextos de negación discursiva, oracional y existencial. La negación en estas lenguas también interactúa con el aspecto y la modalidad. Los niños que adquieren la lengua k’iche’ usan una forma interna de la negación a nivel oracional mientras que los niños que adquieren el yucateco y q’anjob’al emplean una forma externa de la negación a nivel oracional. Los niños que adquieren el k’iche’ y el yucateco marcan satisfactoriamente el contraste entre las formas de negación discursiva y oracional. Los datos muestran que los niños en cada lengua crean sus propias formas de negación. 

... Yucatec Maya 399 Dressler, Wolfgang U., and Annemarie Karpf 1995 The theoretical relevance of pre-and protomorphology in Lan-guage acquisition. Yearbook of Morphology 1994: 99-122.Kramer, Martin, and Dietrich Wunderlich 1999 Transitivity alternations in Yucatec ...

... Yucatec Maya 399 Dressler, Wolfgang U., and Annemarie Karpf 1995 The theoretical relevance of pre-and protomorphology in Lan-guage acquisition. Yearbook of Morphology 1994: 99-122.Kramer, Martin, and Dietrich Wunderlich 1999 Transitivity alternations in Yucatec ...