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Dependent Verbs in Sierra Popoluca 252
4. ON THE STATUS OF THE DEPENDENT VERB AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE
ANALYSIS. The data on which this analysis is based come from a number of sources. The
primary sources consist of transcriptions of narratives and conversations and data from
elicitation sessions gathered during a number of field visits ranging from four weeks to 11
months with speakers from the communities of San Pedro Soteapan, Santa Rosa Cintepec,
and Piedra Labrada in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. During these field visits, conducted
from 2004 through 2009, I have recorded and transcribed narratives and descriptive texts
by men and women ranging between the ages of 30 and 70 years. Each field visit consists of
conducting text transcription in order to consistently build the corpus of naturally occurring
data, as well as elicitation to supplement the analysis of data from texts and complete
paradigms in the grammar. The secondary sources consist of materials I obtained from the
Project for the Documentation of Languages of Meso-America (PDLMA). These resources
include a lexical database (Kaufman & Himes, in preparation), transcribed texts produced
by the PDLMA, and texts collected by researchers associated with the Summer Institute of
Linguistics. An additional source of textual data on SP is the published text Hem Tzitzimat
‘La Chichimeca’ (Gutiérrez Morales & Wichmann 2001). And finally, examples (text and
elicitation) come from Elson (1960a, 1960b), Foster & Foster (1948) and Himes (1997) .
Each of the dependent verb constructions described here has previously been described
to some degree, the most detailed and most recent being that of Himes (1997). I have
attempted to build on these previous descriptions. The first step in doing so sought to reframe
the analysis from the perspective of the dependent verbs and their unifying characteristics;
whereas previous analyses characterized constructions based on the auxiliary verbs, lack
of auxiliary verbs, and subordinator constructions. The similarity in my approach to my
predecessors is that the analysis looks at the language synchronically. Having distinguished
the characteristics of each of the constructions independently, a second step and subject of
further study in understanding DVCs in SP, as well as those of the languages of the Mixe-
Zoquean language family, is to approach the study form a diachronic standpoint.
An important question that arose in describing constructions in which dependent verbs
occurred is whether dependent verbs were verbs or nouns, or lay somewhere in between on
some continuum. There are two characteristics observed in the early analysis that suggested
that dependent verbs were somehow associated with nouns or that verbs in these positions
were to some extent nominalized. One observation is associated with plural marking and
the other with person marking, specifically that Set A person markers indicate agents of
transitive verbs and possessors of nouns. In order to determine the status of dependent
verbs, and further investigate plurality and alignment, I needed to focus on each DVC
type independently. Upon returning to the field and exploring plurality and alignment with
a revised agenda, the observations began to point to dependent verbs preserving verbal
characteristics, including derivational properties, the hierarchical system, and plural
inflection. Although the position that dependent verbs manifest characteristics of nouns has
been revised, it is interesting to note the process through which the analysis went, as well
as to demonstrate the interrelated nature of corpus building, text analysis, and elicitation.
4.1. QUESTIONS ABOUT THE STATUS OF DEPENDENT VERBS. The first characteristic
suggesting the noun-like behavior of DVCs emerged from an analysis that sought to explain
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