Spatial language
and cognition in Mesoamerica
Chol
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Cora
Cora is a Southern Uto-Aztecan
language spoken in Northwest Mexico by
around 17, 000 thousand speakers. The data used in this research Project
comes from the Meseño dialect of Cora spoken in the
towns of Presidio de los Reyes and Santa Cruz del Guaybel. Meseño Cora is an
SOV language with a nominative-accusative alignment. It has several sets of
clitics and one set of prefixes for marking subject. As a primary object
language, it has only one set of prefixes for marking primary object.
Morphological causatives are very productive as well as periphrastic ones.
The system of applicatives is also very productive
since there are few postpositions in the language. Complex sentences are
characterized for being finite, and relative clauses are adjoined similar to
the Australian type, although in Cora they do not have the adverbial reading.
This feature has lead to the fact that Cora is one of the non-configurational languages of Mesoamerica.
It does have depictive predicates, middle voice, and it has an innovation for
marking plural in inanimates nouns very different
from the strategies of the other Uto-Aztecan languages in the Southern area.
It is well known for having several locative prefixes that are pervasive in
the verb, it lacks the category of adjectives as a lexical word class. These
two features, the pervasive system of locative prefixes and the lack of
adjectives, as well as the a great deal of cognates in the lexicon, are
shared by Huichol, a sister language that forms the
corachol branch of Uto-Aztecan.
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Soteapanec
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Huehuetla
Tepehua
Huehuetla Tepehua (Totonacan langauge family) is a
moribund language that is spoken by fewer than 1,500 people in Huehuetla,
Hidalgo and Mecapalapa, Puebla,
which are located in the northeast of Mexico. The term Tepehua is an exonym of Nahuatl origin. The Huehuetla Tepehua speakers call themselves Maqalhqama',
and they call their language Lhiimaqalhqama'.
Tepehua is a polysynthetic, head-marking language
with complex morphology that is both prefixing and suffixing. The basic word
order tends towards VSO and SVO, but varies depending on clausal pragmatics.
Though there is a reference grammar of Hueuetla Tepehua that describes its phonology, morphology, morphosyntax, and syntax (see Kung, A descriptive
grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua,
PhD dissertation in linguistics, University
of Texas at Austin, 2007) the
language remains largely under-documented.
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Huehuetla
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Traditional
clothing
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Ayutla Mixe
Ayutla Mixe is a Mixe-Zoque language spoken in Southern
Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca.
Even though Ayutla Mixe
can be regarded as one of the six dialects of South Highlands Mixe -one of the three languages of the proper Mixe branch- each community constitutes the locus of
linguistic interaction and it is arguable that each community has a different
linguistic system. How different all of the South Highlands Mixe dialects are from each other and even from other Mixe languages is still an unknown matter given the scarce
documentation of these languages.
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Ayutla
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Otomi
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P'orhepecha (Tarasco)
Tarascan or P’orhépecha
is an isolate language spoken in the northwest of Michoacán, México. It is an
agglutinating and dependent-marking language with morphological case of the
nominative-accusative type, and Primary Object constructions. Most of Tarascan’s lexical roots are verb roots from which words
functioning as nouns and nominal modifiers are constructed. There is a
set of classificatory verb roots that convey information about form and
position of objects. These roots blend with a rich system of spatial
suffixes of (lexical affixes) in order to allow the localization of
objects in space.
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Q'anjob'al
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Seri
The Seri people, or as they refer to themselves, Comcáac, ‘the People’, live along the northern coast of
the Sea of Cortez in Sonora, Mexico.
As of 2000 (Gordon, 2005), there were about 800 inhabitants of the Comcáac territory.
The Seri language, or cmiique iitom
‘what a Seri person speaks’, is a linguistic isolate. It has been suggested
that it is part of the putative Hokan stock
(Kroeber, 1915). However, conclusive evidence to support or disprove this
relation has yet to materialize (Marlett, 2001).
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San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec
San Lucas Quiaviní
Zapotec (SLQZ) is a member of the Central (or Valley) Zapotec dialects. The
language is spoken in San Lucas Quiaviní, a
community under the jurisdiction of the municipio
of Tlacolula, in the central valleys
region of the southwestern Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is also spoken by the growing
SLQ sister community in the Los
Angeles, CA area.
SLQZ, as other Zapotec languages, is VSO; in its phonology, it exhibits fortis/lenis consonantal distinction, complex vowel
phonation and tone. Of particular interest to the MesoSpace project is the
use of body-part derived terms in spatial description.
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Sumu
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Tecpatán Zoque
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Tzeltal
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Yucatec Maya
Yucatec is the
largest member of the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan
language family. It is spoken by approximately 760,000 people in the Mexican
states of Campeche,
Quintana Roo, and Yucat‡n,
and approximately 5,000 in the Cayo District of
Belize (Ethnologue 2005). Yucatec is the language whose autodenomination,
Maya, has been adapted by scholars to name the Mayan language family. Dr.
Bohnemeyer has worked extensively on the expression of spatial, temporal, and
causal relations and on argument structure and lexical aspect in Yucatec.
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Yaxley
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Yaxley
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