Comitative Coordination in Q’anjob’al

I argue that the cross-linguistic morpho-syntactic diversity of expressions for ’and’ corresponds to a diversity of semantic interpretations. My work is based on a case study of Q’anjob’al (Mayan, Guatemala) which presents several ways of expressing ’and’. Q’anjob’al employs both a comitative conjunction yetoq ‘with’, and a European-style conjunctions k’al and i ‘and’, freely applicable to various syntactic categories. While some coordinators like Q’anjob’al i and English and can be given a unified order-theoretic denotation (Keenan and Faltz 1985; Rooth and Partee 1983), where NP coordination is a pointwise extension of the clausal case, I propose to treat the sentential usage of yetoq as a metaphorical extension of its basic sum meaning from the NP case to discourse units. This analysis of yetoq supports the hypothesis that sentential and NP coordination can be related in different ways in different languages.