Acquisition of an Endangered Mayan Language: A Corpus of Child Chuj

FAIN: FN-50114-13

Pedro Mateo-Pedro
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)

The present proposal seeks funding for one year to continue with our previous DEL-funded project on the documentation of the Chuj language of San Mateo Ixtatán, with special emphasis on the verb morphology in simple clauses and Agent Focus constructions. The project will make critical contributions to theories of language acquisition, and, more broadly, to the current understanding of extraction and transitivity. The Chuj corpus will thus contribute to a small but growing body of work on under-documented non-Indo-European languages. Documenting the developmental acquisition of Chuj with particular attention to Agent Focus constructions will encourage more investigation of complex constructions in Mayan languages within the field, while also contributing to our understanding of these constructions in adult Mayan grammar. The project will also validate the intellectual importance of Chuj, one of the most endangered Mayan languages, among the members of the Chuj community and among language scholars. (Edited by staff)