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ERIC Number: EJ1319057
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Jan
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Germination, Early Development, and Creativity in the Acquisition of the Yucatec Maya Deictic System
Espinosa Ochoa, Mary Rosa
Journal of Child Language, v49 n1 p24-37 Jan 2022
The Yucatec Maya language has a highly complex deictic system with interesting typological differences that in addition to demonstratives and locative adverbs also includes ostensive evidentials and modal adverbs. Given that deictic words are among the first that children produce, the aim of this study is to identify the early acquisition that Yucatec Mayan children follow to map out each deictic form. Deictic words taken from spontaneous, longitudinal, transversal corpora and Gaskins's (1990) field work annotations were labeled and analyzed. The results show that children begin by uttering protoforms mapped with prototypical functions of locative and modal adverbs, but the functions of both demonstratives and ostensive evidentials are expressed mostly with the same protoform, which is similar to the deictic organizations of other languages. When children become productive, they overextend functions, which demonstrates a reanalysis of the system before acquisition is complete.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A