Fronting of Nondirect Arguments and Adverbial Focus Marking on the Verb in Classical Yucatec

Abstract

Classical Yucatec Maya has two different sets of inflection: unmarked and marked verb forms. When a nondirect argument—an adverbially functioning word or phrase—is fronted to a preverbal position, the verb appears in a marked form. The marked verb forms in question show split ergative morphology, which is controlled by both aspect and person. Since adverbially functioning words and phrases are the same in form as nonadverbial adjectives, nouns, past participles etc., I argue that adverbial function is marked on the verb. Unlike other Mayan languages, which have invariant verbal suffixes for fronted nondirect arguments, Classical Yucatec employs a complete set of aspectual markers to signal the adverbial function of a fronted constituent. I propose that the strategy of marking adverbial function on the verb is available to Classical Yucatec because it is a head‐marking language, where markers tend to appear on heads rather than dependents.

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