January 27, 2025
The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, February 3, with a talk by visiting scholar Carol Rose Little (University of Oklahoma), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "The syntax of accompanying in Ch’ol (Mayan)." In addition to the syntactic analysis, Carol Rose will discuss connections to her work as a Ch'ol courtroom interpreter. The abstract is as follows:
In the sentence, I left with Juan, let us look at the prepositional phrase “with Juan.” The preposition selects a nominal expression, in this case Juan, as its complement and the phrase is adjoined as an adjunct. The same sentence translated into Ch’ol, a Mayan language of southern Mexico, is Tsajñiyoñ kik’oty xWañ, where ik’oty means “with” and appears with k-, a first-person prefix. But this is not the only option! Tsajñiyoñ yik’oty xWañ is also possible, where y- is a third person marker. In this talk, I explore the syntax of comitatives, i.e., of accompanying, and how structure is reflected on ik’oty. I draw on data from texts, naturalistic speech, and elicitations to shed light on what Ch’ol can teach us about modifiers and their attachments sites. I extend insights from this research to my other work in translating and interpreting in Ch’ol—for instance, what implications does using one form over the other have for precisely conveying meaning in a courtroom setting?