University of Texas Rio Grande Valley ScholarWorks @ UTRGV Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations College of Liberal Arts 4-2017 Positional Verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec John Foreman The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Brooke D. Lillehaugen Haverford College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/wls_fac Part of the Indigenous Education Commons, Indigenous Studies Commons, and the Modern Languages Commons Recommended Citation Foreman, John, and Brook Danielle Lillehaugen. “Positional Verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec.” International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 83, no. 2, Mar. 2017, pp. 263–305, doi:10.1086/689846. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts at ScholarWorks @ UTRGV. It has been accepted for inclusion in Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ UTRGV. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. POSITIONAL VERBS IN COLONIAL VALLEY ZAPOTEC 1 JOHN FOREMAN BROOK DANIELLE LILLEHAugEN UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS RIO GRANDE VALLEY HAVERFORD COLLEGE This paper describes the system of positional verbs (e.g., ‘be standing’ and ‘be ly- ing’) 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 texts, and contributes to our understanding of the structure and development of the modern Zapotec positional verb system with implica- tions for the larger Zapotec locative system.