A feature-based analysis of the Ch'ol (Mayan) person paradigm
Carol Rose Little
November 2018 

This paper investigates first person plurals in Ch'ol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico. The Ch'ol person paradigm reveals that the exclusive plural form "oñ=laj-oñ" is derived by adding "-oñ", the first person form, to the inclusive form "oñ=la". Based on empirical generalizations from the usage of the two first person plural forms, I recategorize the inclusive as a general first person plural and the exclusive as a specified exclusive form that explicitly excludes the hearer. I provide data showing that the exclusive form is both morphologically and semantically more complex. I formalize the person paradigm in Ch’ol with binary features (e.g. Noyer 1992, Bobaljik 2008, Watanabe 2013). I argue that a binary feature approach with a [±hearer] feature can better capture the Ch’ol data as it can explicitly exclude the hearer from the representation. I argue that the Ch’ol data poses challenges for privative feature approaches, like feature geometries (e.g. Harley & Ritter 2002, Cowper & Hall 2005) as these privative systems do not have a way to explicitly exclude a [hearer] feature.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004929 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 44th Berkeley Linguistics Society
keywords:	clusivity, inclusive/exclusive, mayan, ch'ol, person, binary features, privative features, morphology
Downloaded:	274 times

 

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