Mesoamerican languages have long attracted the attention of

linguists. Their often bewildering morphosyntactic complexity,

in terms of number of possible forms and constructions as well

as of systemic opacity, presents an exciting challenge for all

theories aiming to devise models of how humans know, acquire

and process their languages.

Although they belong to several, apparently unrelated stocks

- Mayan, Mixe-Zoque, Otomanguean, Totonac, Uto-Aztecan,

and isolates (Huave or Ombeayiüts , Purepecha) - most or all

Amerindian languages spoken between the Northern border of

Mexico and Costa-Rica share a number of grammatical features,

probably as a result of having coexisted in similar natural and

cultural environments for thousands of years. Mesoamerican

languages thus offer rich material for research in historical and

areal linguistics.

Many of these languages are still thriving despite the enduring

and pervasive presence of the originally colonial language,

Spanish. Recent years have even seen a renewal of the efforts

to promote at least some of them to the status of written

languages and to use them as teaching media in local schools.

Rich opportunities are thus offered not only to specialists in

language development, but to all field linguists who consider

social benefits to the people they study a crucial aspect of their

work.

In this volume, the focus on inflectional morphology is

easily justified by the already mentioned attribute many of

these languages share, namely dauntingly complex paradigms,

especially in the verbal domain. Not only are the various,

semantically distinct forms assumed by one lexeme extremely

numerous, but the phonological relations between the forms

are often complex, sometimes quite opaque. Such a state of

affairs makes Mesoamerican languages a central piece in current

debates in morphological theory.

We hope this book will provide seminal insight into the

complexity of morphological patterns in Mesoamerican

languages from a plurality of prospects (language by itself,

formal grammars, pragmatic and semiotic embedding of

categories, interfaces between phonology, morphology and

syntax, language in society, complexity theory), and will

substantially contribute to foster interdisciplinary research in

the field.