User:Gaardemouk/sandbox/positionals

Statives and positionals

In Mayan languages, statives are a class of predicative words expressing a quality or state, whose syntactic properties fall in between those of verbs and adjectives in Indo-European languages. Like verbs, statives can sometimes be inflected for person but normally lack inflections for tense, aspect and other purely verbal categories. Statives can be adjectives, positionals or numerals.

Positionals, a class of roots characteristic of, if not unique to, the Mayan languages, form stative adjectives and verbs (usually with the help of suffixes) with meanings related to the position or shape of an object or person. Mayan languages have between 250 and 500 distinct positional roots:

Telan ay jun naq winaq yul bʼe.

There is a man lying down fallen on the road.

Woqan hin kʼal ay max ekkʼu.

I spent the entire day sitting down.

Yet ewi xoyan ay jun lobʼaj stina.

Yesterday there was a snake lying curled up in the entrance of the house.

In these three Qʼanjobʼal sentences, the positionals are telan ("something large or cylindrical lying down as if having fallen"), woqan ("person sitting on a chairlike object"), and xoyan ("curled up like a rope or snake").