The role of semantic value in lexical comparison: motion and position roots in Yucatec Maya*

Approaches to lexical semantics often rely on denotational overlap with English words (or their systematized scientific offspring) to establish the meanings and groupings of lexemes in other languages and typically ignore the local facts of morphosyntactic distribution and characteristic denota­ tional range. By contrast, this paper illustrates the importance of morpho­ syntactic distributional patterns in assessing the ,Iemantics of "spatial" predicates in Yucatec Maya, a language spoken in southeastern Mexico. A sketch ofportions of the morphology of the Yucatec verb complex and its implications for the meanings of lexical roots are first presented. Then two sets of "spatial" roots are analyzed to see how the overall Yucatec scheme informs their semantics. The first analysis shows that "spatia/" predicates defined notionally do not form a unified root class in Yucatec and in particular that those dealing with basic "motions" are both morphologically distinct from other roots with spatial reference and indistinguishable from other roots referring to state changes. The second analysis shows that "posit(onaC predicates do in fact form a unified root class in Yucatec, one which would not be constituted on the basis of the analysis of English "spatial" semantics. The concluding discussion stTi'sses the importance of systematically attending to local structural facts in order to formulate an adequate formal-functional theory of lexical meaniflg.