The next talk in our 2025-2026 McGill Linguistics Colloquium Series will be given by Justin Royer (Université de Montréal) on Friday January 30th at 3:30pm at Leacock 232. The details of the talk are given below.
Title: Wh-questions and predication in Chuj
(Presenting joint work with Cristina Buenrostro and Rodrigo Ranero)
Abstract: This paper examines the syntax of quantificational expressions and wh-questions in Chuj, a Mayan language spoken primarily in Guatemala and Mexico. Building on previous related work (Royer, Buenrostro & Jenks to appear), we argue that Chuj quantifiers fall into two distinct syntactic categories. Some quantifiers function exclusively as determiners, while others belong to the well-established category of nonverbal predicates (Grinevald and Peake 2012, Coon 2016, Armstrong 2017, Mateo Toledo 2023). This syntactic split is supported by a range of diagnostics, which we systematically apply to another type of quantifier: wh-items. The results indicate that Chuj wh-items should be treated exclusively as nonverbal predicates, leading us to reanalyze wh-questions as constructions that most often involve relativization of a subject. Our novel approach challenges the prevailing view in the Mayanist literature, which has treated wh-items as components of the extended nominal domain, supporting a less common one instead (Zavala 1992, Tonhauser 2003, 2007). We demonstrate that our proposal also derives three (seemingly idiosyncratic) properties of Mayan wh-questions in a unified and theoretically appealing way: (i) the apparent ban on wh-in-situ (Caponigro et al. 2021, Coon et al. 2021), (ii) the ban on multiple wh-questions (Caponigro et al. 2021, Coon et al. 2021), and (iii) the phenomenon known as “pied-piping with inversion”(Smith-Stark 1988, Aissen 1997).
A draft of Justin and colleagues’ paper is available here: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009274