Fixed-VSO word order in Mayan is a syntactic, not prosodic, innovation

Document Type

Journal Article

Role

Author

Journal Title

Linguistic Variation

Publication Date

9-9-2025

Abstract

Fixed-VSO word order is understood to be a relatively recent innovation within the Mayan language family (England 1991), although it is a matter of recent debate whether this innovation is best understood as a prosodic (Clemens & Coon 2018) or a syntactic (Little 2020b) one. This paper adjudicates between these two proposals by closely examining the fixed-VSO Mayan language Mam. The data from Mam are consistent with Little’s (2020b) syntactic approach by which objects raise overtly in the narrow syntax, where they hold certain structural and interpretational properties consistent with their high position.

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