Mayan Morphosyntax

Abstract

This paper uses data from the Mayan languages to evaluate expanded [NFL theories derived from the work of Pollock (1989) and Chomsky (1995). The combination of ergative agreement with subject agreement closer to the verb than object agreement pose interesting problems for this framework. The real challenge, however, is to account for the variation in verbal agreement that occur across this family of languages. The languages exhibit several forms of functional interaction that are not predicted within the expanded [NFL framework. Structural configurations must be augmented with something like a feature matrix to capture significant interactions that take place between functional heads in the world's languages.