Mayan Morphosyntax

This article outlines some of the basics of the morphology and syntax of Mayan languages. I begin in Section 1 with a tour of the core verbal complex, including roots, stem formation, voice and valence morphology, person and number marking, and TAM (primarily aspect) morphology. The ergative alignment pattern, along with split ergativity and ref lexes of syntactic ergativity, is outlined in greater detail in Section 2. Looking outside of the verb stem, we turn to the noun phrase in Section 3 and examine word order in Section 4; Section 5 turns brief ly to embedded clauses and nominal licensing.