This book offers a detailed synchronic analysis of the tense/aspect/mood (TAM) systems in five modern Cholan-Tseltalan Mayan languages: Chol, Chontal, Ch’orti’, Tseltal, and Tsotsil. It emphasizes the distinction between the grammatical core and periphery in understanding the verbal grammatical structures. The core consists of essential grammatical categories, including obligatory paradigms of mutually exclusive forms and their markers. In contrast, the periphery includes various semi-grammatical elements that modify the meanings of these categories. The work is structured into five chapters and a conclusion. The introductory chapter presents an overview of the Cholan-Tseltalan languages and outlines the study's methodology and theoretical framework. Chapter 2 examines the formal structures of the TAM systems in each language, highlighting significant differences despite their genetic relatedness, attributed to unique evolutionary patterns and areal influences from neighboring languages. Chapter 3 focuses on the morphosyntactic properties of the grammatical periphery. The subsequent chapters provide an extensive semantic analysis of TAM markers and categories, with Chapter 4 addressing temporal and aspectual semantics, and Chapter 5 exploring modal semantics, including mood and reality status.
