Headless Relative Clauses in Yucatec Maya

Abstract

This chapter surveys headless relative clauses (i.e. ones with no overt head noun) in Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of southern Mexico. For Indo-European languages, discussion of such constructions has focused on “free relative clauses”—those with only a bare wh-word in place of a head—and to a lesser extent, “light-headed” relative clauses⎯those with a dedicated set of pronominal elements in place of a head noun. In contrast, Yucatec Maya is shown to allow for four different kinds of surface headless relative clause forms depending on the presence or absence of a wh-word and the presence or absence of a determiner, quantifier, or other D-element. With respect to free relative clauses, whereas many more well-studied Indo-European languages have morpho-syntactically distinct constructions for definite and indefinite free relative clauses (e.g. with an infinitive or subjunctive form in the latter case), Yucatec Maya is shown to have a single morpho-syntactic form whose (in)definiteness is determined by syntactic context.