UCLA

A recent research program – which, after Royer (2022), we may call the “prosody as syntactic evidence” research program – has aimed to use a language’s prosodic structure to make proposals about its syntactic structure, given that it has long been understood that the two are correlated. This dissertation, situated squarely within this research program, presents two major findings about Mam, an understudied Mayan language of Guatemala and Mexico. First, using a number of purely syntactic diagnostics, I show that Mam’s VSO word order is best described as arising from verb- raising (Clemens & Coon 2018), not predicate remnant raising (Coon 2010b) or right-oriented specifiers (Otaki et al. 2019, Little 2020, Scott 2023). Second, I provide further prosodic evidence of this conclusion by describing the prosodic phrasing of Mam VSO declaratives. Across a number of sentence types, including those whose verbs are modified by directional auxiliaries and whose subjects and objects are modified by adjectives, it is shown that Mam’s prosodic phrasing can be read directly off the syntactic tree if verb-raising is assumed. These facts in hand, I develop a prosodic typology of VSO languages, and find that only three prosodic profiles are attested, as proposed by Brinkerhoff et al. (2021), among which Mam, despite being syntactically complex, patterns similarly to other well-documented languages like Irish (Elfner 2012, 2015).