International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

22 June - 3 July 2009

Understanding grammar, for instance Yucatec Maya

Christian Lehmann

When a linguist with a European background encounters an unfamiliar language, he cannot help entertaining expectations based on the languages he grew up with. If faced with constructions thoroughly different from familiar ones, the solution is the one advocated by Frans Boas a century ago: forget about European categories and apply unbiased structural analysis. Three pertinent examples from Yucatec Maya are discussed.

• In order to understand the function of numeral classifiers, linguists have jumped to hypotheses about the peculiar nature of nominal concepts. Languages like Yucatec Maya tell a different story.
• It is an essential feature of the traditional concept of auxiliary that it bear the conjugation the full verb does not bear. In Yucatec Maya, auxiliaries do not inflect.
• Prepositions have traditionally been conceived as a kind of case relators. In Yucatec Maya, they code no relation between their complement and the context.

In each of these cases, the role of the category in question in its language system is first clarified by structural analysis, and then functional accounts are considered.