Conjunction in Colonial Valley Zapotec May Helena Plumb Haverford College December 18, 2015 Abstract Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ) was spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, dur- ing the colonial period; the language is attested a set of printed texts and handwritten documents. In this paper I discuss the four primary conjunctions strategies in CVZ: chela, huanee, =la, and asyndetic con- junction. These conjunction strategies are used interchangeably in CVZ (§2) and throughout a wide time frame and geographic area (§3). In some passages, a scribe alternates between different conjunction strategies to emphasize semantic and syntactic groupings within the construction. To explain these constructions I introduce a theory of localized seman- tic/syntactic sensitivity, an expansion of the current typology of conjunc- tion (§4). 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Colonial Valley Zapotec The Zapotec languages are a diverse group of Otomanguean languages spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico; the time-depth and diversity of Zapotec is comparable to 1 I am deeply indebted to Brook Danielle Lillehaugen and Theodore B. Fernald for their comments and support throughout the writing process. I also thank the anonymous IJAL as- sociate editor and reviewers for their time and feedback, which have been instrumental in the development of this paper. Thank you to George Aaron Broadwell for this initial research on this topic, and to John Foreman, Michael Galant, and Pamela Munro for their helpful conver- sations about this paper and CVZ grammar in general. Finally, many thanks to Isabel Gross, Zak Oglesby, and Jack Rasiel. Previous versions of this work were presented at the Coloquio sobre Lenguas Otomangues y Vecinas VI: Mario Molina Cruz (2014) and the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. All errors are my own. 1