Maša at SSILA
January 14, 2023
Reanalyzing K'iche' as a tensed language.
January 20-23, Maša Bešlin is at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, presenting "Reanalyzing K'iche' (Mayan) as a Tensed Language". Here is the abstract:
"Mayan languages have been claimed to lack Tense morphology. Temporal interpretation is instead said to be guided by grammatical aspect (see e.g., Larsen 1988 for K’iche’, Vázquez Álvarez 2002 for Chol, Bohnemeyer 2002 for Yucatec Maya, Coon 2016 for an overview, a.o.). In this talk, I contribute to the discussion of how temporal information is encoded in Mayan languages by examining the distribution and interpretation of the Tense/Aspect (TA) markers x- and k- in K’iche’, traditionally said to mark perfective and imperfective Aspect, respectively. I conclude that, in K’iche’, these affixes mark (past and non-past) Tense rather than Aspect."