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Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely borrowing the Spanish preposition sin, the use of regular negative constructions, including negative existential and copulative constructions, and developing functionally restricted markers for particular semantic domains (body parts, clothes, and so forth). The fact that Mesoamerican languages are averse to the use of negative comitative or instrumental constructions supports that privatives have a more complex semantic nature than a simple negation of possession, existence, or comitativity. A notable similarity in the privative constructions employed in Mesoamerica and in the languages to the north reflects the linguistic relationship between Mesoamerica and the American Southwest.

This paper revisits the translational practices of Dominican missionaries who worked in multilingual settings in the Guatemalan highlands in the colonial period. It is argued that the missionaries developed the emerging ideas of European Renaissance linguistics and applied methods of contrastive linguistics to indigenous languages long before this discipline came into being. The main argument derives from an 18th-century collection of missionary writings in Q'eqchi' and Poqomchi', two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. An uncommon phrase-by-phrase alignment of bilingual texts allows for the assumption that a contrastive approach to genetically related languages could be the underlying principle in language learning and translation at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of the grammatical category of person within a specific discursive genre - ceremonial speech. This kind of discourse occurs during traditional offering rituals, which form part of the common Mayan culture. The focus of this study is on the Poqomchi' Maya tradition. There are three major categories of participants in the ritual: spiritual guides, attendees and supernatural beings to whom the invocations are addressed. A linguistic analysis of the word forms that bear person marking and their referents in ceremonial discourse elucidates the specific relations between participants and provides insight into the internal structure of the ritual act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]