Positional Verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec

Authors

John Foreman, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Brooke D. Lillehaugen, Haverford College

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2017

Abstract

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.

Comments

© 2017, International Journal of American Linguistics. Original published version available at https://doi.org/10.1086/689846.

Recommended Citation

Foreman, John, and Brook Danielle Lillehaugen. “Positional Verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec.” International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 83, no. 2, Mar. 2017, pp. 263–305, doi:10.1086/689846.

Publication Title

International Journal of American Linguistics

DOI

10.1086/689846