Introduction to Mayan Linguistics

This special issue of Language and Linguistic Compass is dedicated to a three-part survey of the grammatical structure of Mayan languages. The articles in this collection focus on core, well-studied aspects of Mayan linguistics: phonology (Bennett), syntax (Coon), and semantics (Henderson). The perspective taken is broadly typological, but also informed by theoretical issues in formal linguistics. Our goal is to share the richness of Mayan languages with the broader linguistic community, in the hopes of encouraging future research on these fascinating languages. This introduction includes an overview of the Mayan language family and its internal structure (§2), as well as a discussion of the kinds of publications that we’ve drawn on in compiling the target articles (§3). We close with an outline of the glossing and transcription conventions that we’ve adopted for this special issue (§4).