El prohibitivo en las lenguas mayas cholanas y tseltalanas: un estudio microtipológico

Abstract

This article describes the morphosyntactic structure of prohibitive (negative imperative) constructions in five Mayan languages of the Cholan-Tseltalan subgroup. These closely related languages use at least three different grammatical strategies to express the prohibitive meaning. The analysis corroborates the typological observation that the semantic nature of the prohibitive is more complex than a simple combination of the negative polarity and the imperative modality. The variation is studied under the “micro-typological” approach that, in this particular case, is superior to a “macro-typological” study based on a wide sampling of languages since it allows obtaining a more detailed perspective and plotting hypotheses about possible diachronic changes.