Dual Categories, and their Doubling, in Q'eqchi' (Maya)



This article is about four aspectual adverbs in Q’eqchi’ (Maya), which may be loosely glossed as ak ‘already’, maaji’ ‘not yet’, toj ‘still’, and ink’a’ chik ‘no longer’. I show the presupposition and assertion structure of these forms in unmarked usage (as sentential operators acting on imperfective predicates), and argue that they constitute a dual group in the tradition of Loebner (1989) who worked on similar operators in German. I show the wide range of other functions such forms serve in more marked usage, and the ways they may co-occur with each other in the same clause (and thereby ‘double’). I offer a semantics that accounts for the multiple functions of all such constructions, highlighting the ways these forms are similar to, and different from, their German and Spanish counterparts.



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