Positional Verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec

Abstract

John foreman Brook Danielle lillehaUGen University of texas rio GranDe valley haverforD colleGe This paper describes the system of positional verbs (e.g., 'be standing' and 'be lying') in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ), a historical form of Valley Zapotec preserved in archival documents written during the Mexican colonial period. We provide data showing that positional verbs in CVZ have unique morphological properties and participate in a defined set of syntactic constructions, showing that positional verbs formed a formal class of verbs in Valley Zapotec as early as the mid-1500s. This work contributes to the typological literature on positional verbs, demonstrating the type of morphosyntactic work that can be done with a corpus of CVZ texts, and contributes to our understanding of the structure and development of the modern Zapotec positional verb system with implications for the larger Zapotec locative system. [keyworDs: Zapotec, indigenous colonial writing, language and space, positional verbs] 1 We thank Keren Rice, David Beck, the IJAL associate editors, and the IJAL reviewers for their helpful suggestions. This work was originally presented at the First International Conference on Mesoamerican Linguistics. As always, we are indebted to our Zapotec language teachers and consultants, especially Felipe H. Lopez and Margarita Martínez, who provided the audio data accessible on the online version. We are grateful to the members of the UCLA Zapotexts research group, led by Pamela Munro and Kevin Terraciano, and the Seminario de zapoteco colonial at the UNAM in Mexico City, led by the late Thomas Smith Stark:

Experiential motivation and the linguistics of sitting, standing, and lying

“…The six verbs include all three cardinal posture verbs and three others with meanings “perch”, “go”, and “travel”. Foreman and Lillehaugen (2017, pp. 271–277) identify a class of “positional” verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec, a historical variety of Zapotecan languages (Mexico) with special formal properties.…”

Propiedades de los verbos posicionales en el zapoteco de Yalálag

“…Hay dos mecanismos para introducir la clb. El primero se presenta en (8), donde observamos una cláusula con un orden vs, que tiene como primer componente una frase verbal (dulte), a la que sigue un pronombre enclítico (=n) y en posición final la frase o sintagma adposicional (xhàn yày bchèkwnhà), introducida por un sustantivo relacional (sr) -término en las lenguas zapotecas que deriva diacrónicamente de una parte del 4 Para una revisión exhaustiva, ver el volumen editado por Lillehaugen y Sonnenschein (2012) y Foreman y Lillehaugen (2013). Para una revisión diacrónica de los verbos posicionales en el zapoteco colonial, ver Foreman y Lillehaugen (2017: 263-309).…”