Volume 71, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Typological change in Mesoamerica, Issue Editor: José Antonio Flores Farfán

This paper addresses the issue of the reported optional character of numeral classifiers in Classical and Colonial Nahuatl. On the basis of the qualitative assessment of the co-occurrence of numerals with classifiers or zero in constructions which serve the purpose of quantifying or ordinally ranking NPs, the optionality hypothesis is assessed. The question is raised whether or not the presence and absence of classifiers is arbitrary or triggered by formal and/or functional factors. To this end, empirical evidence of the phenomena under review has been gathered from a selection of texts of the colonial era. Quantitative findings based on the Codex Florentinus are presented too. The discussion of these data uncovers that the classifier system of Classical and Colonial Nahuatl does not lend itself to a straightforward characterization so that further investigations are called for.

This paper aims to investigate the non-overt marking of spatial relations in the Mesoamerican area with regard to the relationship between spatial interrogatives and spatial declaratives. It is argued that languages which indiscriminately employ the same word form as spatial deictic interrogative for all three basic spatial relations, place, goal and source , do not employ grammaticalized markers for allative and/or ablative functions. Instead they rely on motion verb constructions the semantics of which determine the spatial reference as well as the direction of motion. These systems, however, change via the intrusion of the Spanish preposition de .

This paper aims at broadening the interdisciplinary field of linguistic typology and dialectology, through diasystemic ecology, from the standpoint of inflectional morphology. Mazatec inflectional classes and intricate patterns of paradigm diversification are scrutinized through a survey of dialect taxonomies and an overall model describing main parameters, such as subconflation, inflectional class shifts and metatypes. This approach provides as efficient a grid to observe dialect divergence and convergence as traditional isoglosses, especially considering the high degree of regularity and systematicity of inflectional class processes in the Mazatec dialect network.

This paper is based on extensive team research focusing on the reconstruction of the history of contact-induced change in Nahuatl from the first encounter with Spanish until the present day, taking into account both peripheral and central varieties. We trace the long-term trajectories of several morphosyntactic features that mark typological change: animacy as a grammatical category; the relational word as a lexical category; the formal distinction between comitative and instrumental markers; existential predicative possession; and relatively free word order. We argue that key innovations in Nahuatl during the colonial period are either borrowed from Spanish or begin as minor internal patterns that gradually become dominant due to similarity with an element of Spanish structure, and that these two processes have driven typological change in the language.