The syntax of quantifiers in Chuj

Abstract This paper provides a novel description and syntactic analysis of different types of quantifiers in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. We focus on a subset of expressions that quantify over entities, and that have been noted to appear obligatorily in sentence-initial position. We argue that three types of quantifiers should be distinguished: (i) Predicative A-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because Chuj is a predicate-initial language; (ii) Focus D-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because they are lexically specified for an A ' feature; and (iii) Basic D-quantifiers, which, lacking an A ' feature, have no effects on the syntactic position of their host arguments. We also sketch syntactic analyses of each type of quantifier.