Mayan in Cunén: Dialectics of Symbolism

In this dissertation I exemplify a series of (linguistic) anthropological approaches to the diachrony of languages through discussion and analysis of novel and old data centering on varieties of Mayan spoken in Cunén, a municipality in the southeastern Cuchumatán mountains of Guatemala. A dialectic of social differentiation between autochthony (being from "here") versus allochthony (being from "elsewhere") organizes regional society, including regional plurilingualism. Allochthons around the town of Cunén and around the surrounding towns of Sacapulas and Uspantán are mostly K'iche' speaking, while autochthons speak codes particular to their local autochthonous social formations: in Sacapulas, the autochthons speak Sakapulteko among themselves, in Uspantán, they speak Uspanteko, and in Cunén, they speak what I refer to as "C." Unlike the other languages I have mentioned, C is not an officially recognized language in Guatemala, though some have come to call it "Cunenteco ~ Kunenteko" locally. This dissertation presents the results of the first systematic studies of the structure of C. Triangulation of the results of my research with the findings of Mayanist comparativist linguistics allows us to identify C as the only member of its own branch of K'iche'an Proper within Mayan (though it could also have possibly split "higher up" within Greater K'iche'an). In addition to many unique lexicogrammatical developments characteristic only of C, also of comparative note are various outcomes of previous linguistic contact, especially with Sakapultekan languages and with Uspanteko, which attest to deeper histories of plurilingualism for regional autochthonous society. One regional innovation shared with Uspanteko is tone, otherwise unique in Eastern Mayan, and in this dissertation I offer the first description of the morphophonology of tone in C in comparative (synchronic and diachronic) perspective. This analysis reveals a tonal nominative/accusative pattern laminated on top of a segmental ergative/absolutive one in many predicates in C, which is of typological interest. While attending to these synchronic and diachronic lexicogrammatical themes, I also describe, insofar as it is possible to know, the sociohistorical matrix within which the particular enregistered confluences of symbolic forms and patterns diversified. I pursue this through an analytic synthesis of diverse sources, from colonial archival records and oral history, to visits to archaeological or ancestral sites, to my own and others' ethnography, especially as focused on language and verbal usage. Thus, I juxtapose materials and analytic perspectives from multiple evidentiary paradigms to suggest something of the diachrony of Cunén's envelope of symbolic enregisterment (a discursive envelope or sociohistorical context constituted by a variety of symbolic registers, or different context-indexing ways of formulating the same denotational message)—as well as Cunén's society of speakers—from the Mesoamerican Postclassic onward. Empirically, this dissertation contributes to general and specialist (Mayanist) knowledge about how this corner of southeastern Mesoamerica fits into planetary heteroglossia, ethnology, political geography, archaeology, etc. Theoretically, through the empirically driven methodological synthesis I offer, this dissertation contributes to the linguistic anthropological project of imagining the many functions and complex histories of symbolic form and pattern in the semiotic mediation of communication, especially offering an analysis of the diversification of languages as product of historical processes of enregisterment. Methodologically, this dissertation models a semiotically-informed linguistic anthropological approach to dialectical historical processes of symbolic transformation through exemplary materials bearing on Cunén, from historical linguistic comparison and grammatical description, to the analysis of conversation, to the discussion of archaeology and fashion, etc.