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This book discusses the comparative method of language acquisition research and its use in conducting a comprehensive crosslinguistic analysis that demonstrates how an analysis of one part of the grammar (lexical acquisition) informs the acquisition of verb inflection, which then informs the analysis of Mayan argument structure. The book focuses on how children acquire the Mayan languages K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol and compares these results with those from previous research on other Mayan languages in order to provide a broader picture of Mayan language acquisition. This chapter examines the monolingual approach to crosslinguistic research; the problem of finding a unit of comparison that is valid in all languages for crosslinguistic research on language acquisition; why a crosslinguistic study of language acquisition is needed; the comparative method of crosslinguistic research; and the comparative method as a natural extension to usage-based approaches to language acquisition.

This chapter considers how children acquire the intransitive verb complex in K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol. The intransitive verb complex has four parts: the tense/aspect marker, the subject marker, the status suffix, and the verb root. The first three are interdependent and together indicate transitivity and mood. The Mayan intransitive verb complex is polysynthetic in the sense that it denotes a complete proposition by itself. The verb forms in the indicative and nominalized moods are the most similar across the three languages, except that Mam lacks the status suffixes seen on the Ch'ol and K'iche' verbs. The chapter discusses the Mayan children's production of the intransitive verb complexes in three moods (indicative, imperative, nominalized) in K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol. It uses the comparative method to examine how certain pan-Mayan generalizations affect children's language acquisition with respect to K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol.

This chapter shows how children acquire the ergative person marking system in the Mayan verb complex. English pronouns have different forms that distinguish between the nominative, accusative, and genitive cases. The nominative case applies to pronouns when they occur in the context of sentence subjects, whereas the accusative case applies when the pronouns occur in the context of verb objects. In the case of K'iche', the absolutive person markers apply in the context of the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb. The ergative person markers occur in the context of the subject of transitive verbs (and nominal possessors). The chapter compares children's acquisition of ergative person markers on transitive and intransitive verbs in K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol as well as their acquisition of absolutive person markers on intransitive verbs.

If aliens arrived, could we communicate with them? What are the tools linguists use to decipher unknown languages? How different can languages be from one another? Do these differences have bigger consequences for how we see the world? This chapter addresses these questions through the lens of the 2016 science-fiction film Arrival and the real-life work of language documentation (in particular, the Mayan language Ch’ol). In Arrival, linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks is recruited by the military to translate the language of the newly arrived alien heptapods. Her job is to find the answer to the question everyone is asking: why are they here? Language is a crucial piece of the answer. This chapter discusses the themes which Arrival has brought to the mainstream, including Universal Grammar, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the importance of linguistic fieldwork.