Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages

Ivano Caponigro is Associate Professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He is interested in formal semantics and its interfaces with syntax and pragmatics across languages. He has conducted extensive crosslinguistic work on relative clauses and wh- clauses, with special emphasis on free relative clauses and other headless relative clauses.Harold Torrence is Associate Professor of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the syntax and morphology of African and Mesoamerican languages. He has worked extensively on wh- questions, relativization, focus, and complementation.Roberto Zavala Maldonado is Professor of linguistics at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. He is interested in Mesoamerican languages, typology, language documentation, syntax, and lexicography. He has conducted extensive research on severalmorphosyntactic aspects of Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean languages.

This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of varieties of headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families, all Mesoamerican languages spoken in Mexico and Guatemala and one Chibchan language spoken in Honduras. Headless relative clauses are clauses that often resemble interrogative clauses or headed relative clauses in their morpho-syntactic shape, but whose meaning brings them close to nominal constructions. For the vast majority of the languages in this volume, many of which are endangered and all of which are understudied, the work presented here represents the only published material on the subject.

Preface