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The vanishing of aborigines from particular landscapes is a common trope in literatures of the Americas, as is the stereotypical association of indigenes with different types of silence. Yet even when compelled by the advancement of conquering forces, movements into communicative invisibility and inaudibility can take place on the terms of those forced to disappear. Though produced amid injustice, specters usually have the last word. And they often pronounce it in absence. Narratives such as the Popol Vuh and the much later K'iche' testimonial I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala perform indigenous resistance via unarticulated textualities whose contestatory stories, like the traces left by indigenes in Columbus's diary, lie beyond the reach of foreign incorporation.

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.

For the first time, the ethnohistory of Chocolá and the Guatemalan piedmont—from the Conquest to the colonial period to the postcolonial present day—is provided in some detail, shedding light on the modern factors that impacted the site and led to the gigantic modern-epoch coffee farm at Chocolá and the village of the Maya (primarily K’iche’- and Kaqchikel-speaking) workers attracted, or coerced, to labor on the farm.

This chapter offers a preliminary description of headless relative clauses in K’iche’. The language exhibits all three varieties of free relative clauses that are attested crosslinguistically: maximal, existential, and free-choice. It also has two other kinds of headless relative clauses: light-headed relative clauses introduced by determiners (without wh-expressions) and headless relative clauses with no marking of any kind (neither wh-expressions nor determiners). Overall, the picture that emerges is that all three varieties of free relative clauses exhibit clear morpho-syntactic and semantic differences that differentiate them both from each other as well as from headed relative clauses. One characteristic that helps to differentiate between them is the different subsets of wh-expressions they make use of. All of these wh- clausal constructions are related but, crucially, independent. Of the two kinds of headless relative clauses that do not make use of wh-expressions, one kind—light-headed relative clauses—is introduced by a determiner, while the other kind has no special marking. Both exhibit distributional and semantic restrictions that distinguish them from headed relative clauses.