Thesis--University of Florida. / Description based on print version record. Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 441-448).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-325). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The importance of language and bilinguality in the development, perpetuation, and "degeneration" or change of culture is a central theme throughout this treatise. Original pictorial representations of Mayan hieroglyphic sculpture are included as examples, and represent artistic styles and language variations of written Cholan and Yucatec. Modern Cholan and Yucatecan languages are important in the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphic writing, because these two languages were the languages of the ancient hieroglyphs. Bilinguality as a positive factor Is considered in the florescence and duration of the central lowland Mayan area. The impact of Spanish language on indigenous languages of Mesoamerica is traced from 1519 to the present. Special consideration and speculation is given to the role of Yucatec and Chol as "divine" non secular languages in the florescence of Mesoamerican cultures. This thesis is a continuation and development of undergraduate anthropologic field work undertaken in Mesoamerica during the 1970s. / Graduation date: 1994

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed February 9, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-309). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

The investigation analyses the grammatical and semantic properties of a number of commonly occurring time words in Lakandon Maya, the least described of the four existing Yukatekan languages spoken in southern Mexico and in parts of Guatemala and Belize. Lakandon Maya has around 800 speakers who live in one of two settlements in the southeastern lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The language materials that the analysis rests on were collected by the author in the field as part of a documentation effort supported and funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) at SOAS, University of London. In Lakandon Maya, deictic time words such as 7uhch ('before', 'long ago') and ka7chik ('before', 'previously') have pragmatically dependent features of meaning that relate to the indexical ground rather than the before-after relations relevant to time reference proper. The salient meaning in the two forms can best be described in terms of knowledge asymmetries between the speech participants. However, such modal-like semantics do not exclude the forms from being considered as operators of time reference since they are only used in specific temporal contexts. The results of the investigation point to a shift in meaning in the forms that cannot be anticipated from the available literature on other Yukatekan languages. There, cognates of the investigated forms have been described solely as temporal operators with simultaneous, anterior, and posterior meaning. The investigation argues for a separation between time words that uses the speech situation as the sole point of reference and time words that denote a relation between two events. This separation is defined in terms of speaker-dependent and event-dependent time reference. These concepts are analogous to absolute and relative time reference but should be considered as separate due to the pragmatic motivations that underlie the function and use of the forms.