Texts in Classical Nahuatl of the year 1524, in the genre of formal oratory, reveal extensive use of lines showing parallel morphosyntactic and semantic structure; this parallelism expresses likeness rather than contrast, and is organized in binary sequences which display successive embedding. Analysis and translation of an extended passage point to (a) the applicability of structural analysis to ‘expressive’ as well as ‘referential’ texts; and (b) the importance of understanding oral literatures not just in terms imposed by translators, but in the light of their inherent esthetic principles.

While descriptions and analyses of tonal downstep abound, considerably less attention has been devoted to cases involving tonal upstep. This is no doubt due to the relative scarcity of languages that exhibit upstep. The present study examines certain tonal phenomena in Krachi, a language with two phonologically contrastive pitch levels. I argue that the Krachi data are best analyzed as involving an upward shifting of the tonal register (upstep). I then argue that upstep in Krachi provides evidence for the inclusion of a register tier in tonal theory.

The oft-noted genetic and typological diversity of the languages of the New World is due not to accidents of history but to the operation of regular principles of linguistic geography. Four building blocks of a theory of linguistic diversity are presented here: a classification and measures of diversity, an account of the causes of diversity, measures of rates of differentiation, and means of estimating the age of a linguistic population. On the most conservative archeological view, the New World was first colonized some 12,000 years ago; on the received view, up to 20,000 years ago. But no high-latitude area like Siberia, Beringia, Alaska, or northern Canada could have contributed or transmitted the linguistic diversity to seed the New World in these time frames, and no single dispersing family could have given rise to the attested diversity in these time frames. The unmistakable testimony of the linguistic evidence is that the New World has been inhabited nearly as long as Australia or New Guinea, perhaps some 35,000 years. Genetic unity for ‘Amerind’ is incompatible with the chronology demanded by the linguistic facts.

Verb agreement in the K'iche' agentive voice appears to deviate from the general ergative/absolutive system that K'iche' shares with other Mayan languages. This has led some to treat agreement in the agentive construction as falling outside the scope of the regular agreement system. It has also led to differing views regarding the appropriate syntactic representation of the agentive construction with respect to final transitivity vs. intransitivity. In this article we examine facts relevant to these issues and propose that the agentive voice is a detransitivizing antipassive construction. Recognition of this has the following consequences: (i) we can state a unified condition for the antipassive morphology, and (ii) we demonstrate that this nonregular agreement can be treated as a special case of the general K'iche' agreement system by adopting a lateral feature-passing analysis of the type proposed in Aissen 1987a. The proposed analysis also provides empirical justification for a heretofore somewhat weakly motivated claim of Relational Grammar, Postal's (1977) demotion analysis of antipassive.