LINGUIST List 13.1722

Tue Jun 18 2002

Diss: Lang Description: Mora-Marin "The Grammar..."

Editor for this issue: Karolina Owczarzak <karolinalinguistlist.org>

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1. morabruces, Lang Description: Mora-Marin "The Grammar of Late Preclassic Mayan..."

New Dissertation Abstract

Institution: State University of New York at Albany
Program: Anthropology
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2001

Author: David F Mora-Marin 

Dissertation Title: 
The Grammar of Late Preclassic Mayan Portable Texts

Linguistic Field: Language Description


Dissertation Abstract: 

In this study I describe and analyze the orthography, grammar, and
possible linguistic affiliation of a subset of Late Preclassic texts
present on inscribed jade and stone preciosities. The topic is framed
within an historical anthropological interactionist approach that
applies the following ethnohistorical methods: art history,
archaeology, paleography, epigraphy, and linguistics. I focus on the
application of the paleographic, epigraphic, and linguistic methods,
and use the results to draw out implications for the sociocultural and
linguistic history of Mayan civilization, specifically concerning the
history of the Mayan script and its orthographic conventions, the
linguistic affiliation of the earliest Mayan texts, the social context
for the diffusion of Mayan writing in the Mayan region. After
providing the necessary sociocultural, linguistic, and epigraphic
background for the study of early Mayan writing (Chapters I-III), I
present three epigraphic case studies focusing on the study of
portable texts from the Classic (A.D. 200-900) and Late
Preclassic (400 B.C.-A.D. 200) periods. The first (Chapter
IV) consists of a study of the grammatical structure of the dedicatory
formula of inscribed Classic pottery vases. The second (Chapter V)
consists of a study of the grammatical structure, content, and context
of the texts on Early Classic jade plaques. And the third (Chapter VI)
consists of a detailed description and analysis of the signary and
grammatical structure of a small subset of portable Late Preclassic
Mayan texts. I conclude that the earliest Mayan portable texts exhibit
the same basic orthographic conventions as later Classic texts, that
they represent Ch'olan or Yukatekan languages, that they mainly
contain examples of the dedicatory genre. I then discuss the results
from the case studies and their implications for the sociocultural
context of Late Preclassic Mayan civilization (Chapter VII), as well
as for the sociolinguistic context of Late Preclassic Mayan
hieroglyphic writing (Chapter VIII).