Deciphering Maya hieroglyphics SCHOLARS FIRST BEGAN to unravel the ancient Maya "script" during the 1980s, based primarily on phonetic decipherment of individual signs with reference to recorded languages. But to move beyond simple interpretation to a deeper, grammatical understanding required the application of historical linguistic techniques. From the late 1990s to the present, the understanding of the phonology and grammar of Maya inscriptions has undergone a further revolution. The Linguistics of Maya Writing catches that "second great wave in Maya epigraphy, " bringing together the work...

Semantic alignment refers to a type of language that has two means of morphosyntactically encoding the arguments of intransitive predicates, typically treating these as an agent or as a patient of a transitive predicate, or else by a means of a treatment that varies according to lexical aspect. This collection of new typological and case studies is the first book-length investigation of semantically aligned languages for three decades. Leading international typologists explore the differences and commonalities of languages with semantic alignment systems and compare the structure of these...