Sierra de Zongolica Nawatl verbal constructions

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Sierra de Zongolica Nawatl is a Nawan dialect (Uto-Aztecan) spoken in the mountainous region to the south of the city of Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico. While the language is still the first choice in daily communication for most people in the region, it tends to be weakened in urban settings by the ubiquity of Spanish. The present study of verbal constructions is based upon a corpus o f spoken and written materials in this little studied dialect, while drawing upon the handful of previous works. It is an example of how the elements of morphological structure and their individual semantic content are subordinate their communicative function, i.e. the use to which they are put in the meaningful production of discourse. This is shown, by comparing the context of the speech situation and the communicative task a t hand to the structural elements used to carry out that task. The analyses presented here are by no means intended to be exhaustive, just as the empirical material cannot aspire to be representative of any speech community; rather, the intention is the creation of a panoramic overview of one grammatical category, verbs, in a functional light in order to create openings for further investigations.