Doctoral Dissertation Research: Acquisition of Complex Verb Constructions in Q'anjob'al (Maya)

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This dissertation project documents the acquisition of the verbal complex in Q'anjob'al Maya. The project will be conducted by Mateo Pedro, a native speaker of Q'anjob'al, under the direction of Dr. Clifton Pye. Q'anjob'al is an under-documented and endangered language spoken by spoken by approximately 99,211 people in four Guatemalan communities. Q'anjob'al uses ergative prefixes to cross-reference the subject of transitive verbs and absolutive markers to cross-reference the subjects of intransitive verbs. Q'anjob'al has split ergativity in aspectless dependent clauses, in which the ergative prefixes cross-reference the subjects of intransitive verbs. Transitive verbs in the same aspectless dependent contexts take an intransitive suffix. Aspect is marked by a separate prefix. The dissertation project will use the Q'anjob'al data to evaluate the Root Infinitive Hypothesis (Wexler 1998). This hypothesis argues that even though children know the contexts of finite clauses, they optionally use nonfinite verb forms in root clauses. A conspicuous weakness of work on the Root Infinitive Hypothesis has been the lack of acquisition data from languages with agglutinative inflectional systems. The agglutinative morphology of Q'anjob'al will make it obvious when children produce one or another adult verb form in place of an aspectualy marked verb, or simply omit part of the verbal morphology and produce a non-adult form. More importantly, this project will add significantly to our knowledge of the constellation of verb forms that children produce when acquiring Mayan languages. Another goal of the project is to train native speakers of Q'anjob'al to code the morphosyntax of the Q'anjob'al child data, and make the coded transcriptions available to other scholars and the Q'anjob'al community via the Adquisición de Lenguas Mayas archive (www.almaya.org).