Functional projections and language contact: The case of plural marking of Spanish nouns in Yucatec Maya

Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Bravo¹, Melanie Uth^2
1El Colegio de México, ²Universität zu Köln

Abstract. In this paper we present an analysis of two crosslinguistically different plural markers that coexist in Yucatec Maya (Mayan, Mexico) as a result of language contact with Spanish. We show that the distribution of the Spanish plural marker is exactly like the one of the Yucatec plural marker (unlike Spanish), with the exception that it is sensitive to the presence of a Spanish numeral, in which case it behaves like in Spanish. We develop an analysis where the relevant facts follow from standard assumptions about phrase structure and lexical selection, so long as an analysis is adopted in which the two plural markers are formally different, as has been suggested in the literature.

Keywords: number, plural, language contact, Yucatec Maya, Spanish

For citation: Gutiérrez-Bravo R., Uth M. Functional projections and language contact: The case of plural marking of Spanish nouns in Yucatec Maya. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2020. Vol. 3, iss. 2. Pp. 79–104.