Edited by Enrique L. Palancar, Claudine Chamoreau and Anaïd Donabédian
This volume places topicality at the very heart of grammatical explanation, drawing on richly annotated discourse corpora from lesser-studied languages across the Americas and beyond. Through nine original studies, it demonstrates how aspects of discourse relevance (rather than just abstract… read more
This paper presents a micro-typological study of two closely related Otomi languages of central Mexico, Tilapa Otomi and Northern Otomi from the variety of San Ildefonso Tultepec Otomi, and examines the evolution of their “impersonal-passive” construction. Drawing on natural discourse data and… read more
In this paper, we explore how changes in the inflection class membership of verbs in Matlatzinca (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean, Mexico) lead to changes in both their valency and meaning. In Matlatzinca, verbs often exhibit multiple class membership so that a given verb may be inflected as transitive… read more
This paper is an exploration of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the pseudo-clefts of Tilapa Otomi, an Oto-Manguean language of Mexico. The goal of this paper is to show that the focus phrase in the clefts of Tilapa Otomi is the subject of the cleft construction, which is entirely based on the… read more
In this paper, I study the distribution of two nominalization structures in two closely related Amerindian languages of Mexico (Eastern Otomi and Northern Otomi). The structures involve intransitive nominalizations depicting a customary activity performed by humans (‘hunting’, ‘sowing’, etc.) as… read more
Otomi (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean) is a small group of languages spoken in Mexico which has emerged as a linguistic family in recent times. In this paper, I study relevant changes in the number system of the Otomi languages. These changes constitute an interesting object of study to gain a better… read more
