Talk October 14, 2023

Professor Kerry Hull, Department of Religion at Brigham Young University: “Affect Verbs in Epigraphic Sources and Ch’orti’.”

Affect verbs in Ch’orti’ Mayan are highly descriptive forms that have gone relatively undescribed in published and unpublished literature on the Ch’orti’ language. Affect verbs are characterized by their highly nuanced semantic complexities with visual notations, physical descriptions, sounds, shapes, manners of action, feelings, and repetitive actions. In this presentation, He discussed his analisis of Ch’orti’ affect verbs and examined various affective verbs have been identified in the hieroglyphic script. Affect verbs, as he showed, represent some of the most semantically complex and interesting verb forms found in epigraphic sources. 

Kerry Hull is a professor in the department of Religion at Brigham Young University. He earned a B.A. in Spanish and B.A. in French in 1992 from Utah State University. He received an M.S. in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University in 1993. He completed a Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. His academic interests include Maya linguistics and anthropology, Eastern Polynesian linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and Maya epigraphic studies. He has conducted linguistic, ethnobotanical, ethno-ornithological, and archaeological fieldwork in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and various areas in Polynesia. He is the author of A Dictionary of Ch’orti’ Mayan published in 2016. 

The talk was recorded, and is available for members at Meeting Archives.