Adjectives in Mam
Nora C. England
Mam is the third largest Mayan language, spoken by over 600,000 people in the
north-west highlands of Guatemala, as well as by several small communities in
Mexico and by refugees or immigrants in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
It belongs to the Mamean branch of the eastern division of the Mayan language
family. All of the data presented here are from San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan, Hue-
huetenango.
Mam, like other Mayan languages, has clearly differentiated major word classes
that include nouns, transitive verbs, intransitive verbs, adjectives, positionals, and
adverbs and other particles. Adjective roots are in general a small class in Mayan,
estimated by Terrence Kaufman to include around fifty items, both historically and
in contemporary languages (personal communication). Counting adjective roots
is a problem in Mam, as I will show later, but the number of roots corresponds to
Kaufmans estimate. Many of the meanings expressed by adjectives in European
languages, especially those having to do with PHYSICAL PROPERTIES, are expressed
by positionals in Mayan languages, therefore it is important to contrast adjectives
with positionals as well as with nouns and verbs. Adjective roots specify colours,
stages of development, flavours, and other inherent properties of nouns, such as
hard, soft, heavy, etc. (Kaufman 1990: 68). Adjective stems can be derived through
a wide variety of morphological processes from nouns, verbs, and positionals.
1. General grammatical characteristics of Mam
Mam is head-marking. It inflectionally marks the categories of tense/aspect/mood
and the person and number of subjects and objects on verbs, the person and
number of subjects on non-verbal predicates, the person and number of posses-
sors on possessed nouns, and the person and number of complements on relational
nouns. Relational nouns are an always-possessed class of nouns that function like
prepositions and show agreement with their complements through the possessive
prefix. They mark all nominal functions except subjects and direct object, all loca-
tive NPs, comparative adjective constructions, reflexives, pronominalized posses-
sives, and purpose and reason subordinate clauses. Most inflections are prefixes or
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