UC Berkeley

The focus of this dissertation is the San Juan Atitán (SJA) variety of Mam, a Mayan languagespoken in the highlands of Guatemala. This work brings together descriptive, theoretical, and revitalization threads research on this variety of Mam, which is a highly underrepresented variety in the literature on Mam. The dissertation contains a broad sketch of SJA Mam grammar as a whole, which contributes to the documentation and formal description of variation within the Mam language. The main empirical domain examined in this dissertation is that of pronouns and agreement. While object pronouns in Mayan languages are consistently realized on the verb via agreement, object pronouns in SJA Mam co-occur with default agreement on the verb and full pronouns in object position. This structure has consequences for syntactic theories of object licensing, the movement of objects over subjects, syntactic ergativity, and the realization of agreement morphology– in Mayan languages and beyond. Similarly unique in SJA Mam are subject and possessor pronouns: these pronouns are realized on the verb via agreement as well as reduced pronouns in argument position. The generalization emerges that pronouns undergo reduction only when they trigger agreement morphemes on the verb. The distribution of double marking of pronouns (agreement and pronouns) and the pattern of reduction suggests that morphological operations can be sensitive to whether individual morphosyntactic features have been Agreed with.

This theoretical research has been carried out alongside collaborative work with members of theMam community, namely via Mam language and culture classes in which I was a co-instructor for over three years. In this dissertation, I discuss the history and impacts of the courses in addition to technologies and teaching strategies in order to inspire and provide examples for others engaged in revitalization work.