Chapter 2 - Kaqchikel Mayan

Summary

Chapter 2 sketches aspects of the grammar of Kaqchikel relevant to the discussions in the subsequent chapters. Kaqchikel is a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. It is a head-marking and morphologically ergative language in which subjects and objects are not overtly case-marked for grammatical relations. Rather, grammatical relations are obligatorily marked on predicates, e.g., a verb with two sets of agreement morphemes, one set for a transitive subject and another for a transitive object and an intransitive subject. The word order of Kaqchikel is relatively flexible, and all of the logically possible six word orders are grammatically allowed. Among these, VOS is considered the basic word order of Kaqchikel by many Mayan language researchers.