Diachrony of the perfect paradigm in Mayan languages

The purpose of this dissertation is to reconstruct the history of perfect aspect morphology in the Mayan language family of Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico. Using data from descriptive grammars, I reconstruct the form of the proto-Mayan perfect suffix for transitive and intransitive verbs, and I show how this paradigm changed in the descendant languages as suffixes were innovated, lost, or changed function. In doing this, I highlight how language contact has affected the picture of Mayan perfect marking. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of Mayan linguistic prehistory and, more broadly, provides a case study of reconstructing derivational morphology by comparing language-specific contexts of use. A major claim of this dissertation is that the proto-Mayan perfect was not a canonical inflectional category and instead had derivational characteristics. I argue that the proto-Mayan active and passive transitive perfect constructions were both synchronically based on a patient nominalization, marked with the suffix *(-o)-’m. The widespread perfect suffix -b’il, which Kaufman (2015: 319) reconstructed as the proto-Mayan passive perfect participle, I take to be a Western Mayan innovation that spread to other Mayan languages by contact. Among other specific claims, this dissertation accounts for the areal spread of the Eastern Mayan -maj perfect suffix, which I argue was innovated in Poqom and spread to other Eastern Mayan languages by way of a previously unrecognized contact zone, the Sacapulas Corridor. I also discuss the proto-Central Mayan *-ooj/-uuj derivational suffix, which has infinitival reflexes in most Mayan languages but marks perfect aspect in Poqom, Tseltalan, and Tojol-ab’al; I reconstruct it as an infinitive and account for its development into a perfect suffix in these subgroups.