Temporal Reference in Lakandon Maya

Henry Bergqvist, School of Oriental & African Studies

Project Details:

Individual Graduate Studentship. Duration: 2005-2006. £20,990

Project Summary:

Lakandon Maya is an endangered and underdocumented language belonging to the Yukatekan branch of the Mayan language family. The Lakandones have been the subject of many publications devoted to their religious traditions and their forest dwelling way of life, but surprisingly little work has been done describing their language. The present investigation proposes an extensive documentation of the linguistic practices of Lakandon speakers with a focus on the use of deictic time words/expressions and their meanings. The results of the investigation will consist of a grammatical sketch, a dictionary of 3000+ entries, and a corpus of annotated texts.