Abstract Fixed-VSO word order is understood to be a relatively recent innovation within the Mayan language family ( England 1991 ), although it is a matter of recent debate whether this innovation is best understood as a prosodic ( Clemens & Coon 2018 ) or a syntactic ( Little 2020b ) one. This paper adjudicates between these two proposals by closely examining the fixed-VSO Mayan language Mam. The data from Mam are consistent with Little’s (2020b) syntactic approach by which objects raise overtly in the narrow syntax, where they hold certain structural and interpretational properties consistent with their high position.

Abstract In the generative paradigm, there are at least two schools of thought about the derivation of VSO order via verb raising. One holds that the verb raises to the highest complementizer position (C°) of the matrix clause, in a manner familiar from den Besten’s (1981) analysis of verb second languages like German and Dutch. The other holds that the verb is not in C° at all; rather it appears on the highest head of the inflectional complex, with the subject in some lower structural position. The first of these approaches was popular in the early work in the Government and Binding framework (Stowell 1989, Depréz and Hale 1986, Hale 1989). The latter approach has gained popularity in more recent work (Chomsky 1993, Bobaljik and Camie 1996, Carnie 1995, Chung and McCloskey 1987, Mccloskey 1990, 1991, 1996a, 1996b, Rouveret 1991, Sadler 1988, Guilfoyle 1990, 1993, Duffield 1991, 1995, Pyatt 1992, Fassi Fehri 1993, among many others).