Deriving verb initial word order in Mayan
Abstract:Individual languages in the Mayan family display either rigid VSO or alternating VOS/VSO word orders (England 1991) In this article we review problems with previous accounts of Mayan word order and argue that verb initial (V1) order is consistently derived by head movement of the verb to a position above the subject and below Infl0, which accounts for uniformity in verb stem formation across the family. After an in depth examination of the factors that have been reported to determine postverbal argument order, we present three distinct paths to VOS: (i) postsyntactic reordering of NP objects (following Clemens 2014, 2017) (ii) right side subject topicalization (Can Pixabaj 2004, Curiel 2007) and (iii) heavy NP shift (Larsen 1988) This account makes testable predictions in the domains of word order and prosodic constituency and has implications for the derivation of verb initial order crosslinguistically.