ABSTRACT

This chapter surveys the state of the art of research on the representation of space in Mayan languages. It is organized around the classification of spatial concepts depicted in Figure 12.1. This classification is treated here as an ‘etic grid’, a set of mutually (partially) independent properties applicable to the crosslinguistic and crosscultural exploration of the overarching conceptual domain on a trial-and-revise basis (cf. Moore et al. 2015). It is valid for all languages that have been studied to date (so far as I know); but that does not mean that it is valid for all languages, nor that it is not biased toward better-studied languages.