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Positional Verbs In Colonial Valley Zapotec, John Foreman, Brooke D. Lillehaugen

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes the system of positional verbs (e.g., ‘be standing’ and ‘be lying’) in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ), a historical form of Valley Zapotec preserved in archival documents written during the Mexican colonial period. We provide data showing that positional verbs in CVZ have unique morphological properties and participate in a defined set of syntactic constructions, showing that positional verbs formed a formal class of verbs in Valley Zapotec as early as the mid-1500s. This work contributes to the typological literature on positional verbs, demonstrating the type of morphosyntactic work that can be done with a corpus of CVZ …