Lexical Polycategoriality

The fact that ergative-absolutive inflectional morphology applies to nouns as well as to verbs in Yucatec Maya obscures the boundary between nouns and verbs, and makes it difficult for children to acquire the distinction between them. Acquisition is particularly difficult for the category of action nouns which can be used as either nouns or verbs in Yucatec. The analysis of the spontaneous speech of two Yucatec monolingual children from 1;9 to 2;3 shows that the most frequent action noun ‘play,