A Grammar of Sierra Popoluca

Description

This work is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken by approximately 28,000 people in Veracruz, Mexico. This detailed description and analysis includes an overview of the language and its family, its typological features and its phonology. The grammar also provides an overview of the word classes, including verbs, nouns, relational nouns/postpositions, adjectives, adverbs, numbers, and formative types. The bulk of this grammar is devoted to the morphosyntax of Sierra Popoluca, including nouns and nominal morphology, verbs and verbal morphology, and the mechanisms for expressing tense, aspect, mood, and modality. An agglutinating, polysynthetic, head-marking language with ergative-absolutive alignment and sensitivity to animacy and saliency hierarchies, Sierra Popoluca has a number of strategies to form complex predicates, which include verb serialization, noun incorporation, and dependent verb constructions. These complex predicate formation strategies and sentence-level syntax are also described here. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. There is no competing work that provides the breadth and depth of coverage of the Sierra Popoluca grammar. Acknowledgements Contents List of Tables List of Figures Abbreviations and Symbols Part I: Introduction and Preliminaries 1 Introduction 2 Phonology 3 Words and Formatives Part II: Nouns and Their Projections 4 Nouns and Their Morphology 5 Nominal Modifiers 6 Postpositions and Relational Nouns 7 Adverbs and Adverbial Particles Part III: Verbs and Statives 8 Verb Classes 9 Non-verbal Predicates 10 Verbal Derivation 11 Alignment and Number 12 Aspect, Mood, and Modality 13 Voice and Other Argument-Event Relationships 14 Valency Increasing 15 The Verbal Template and Affix Ordering Part IV: Sentence Structure 16 The Basic Clause 17 Negation 18 Interrogative Clauses 19 Topic and Focus Part V: Complex Structures 20 Complex Predicates I: Noun Incorporation 21 Complex Predicates II: Verb Serialization 22 Complex Predicates III: Dependent Verbs 23 Complement Clauses 24 Relative Clauses 25 Adverbial and Conditional Clauses 26 Secondary Predication 27 Coordination Part VI: Conclusion 28 Conclusion 29 Text 30 Text Corpus and Coding Guide Bibliography