In Proceedings of the Workshop on the Structure and Constituency of Languages of the Americas 21, University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 46, Megan Keough, Natalie Weber, Andrei Anghelescu, Sihwei Chen, Erin Guntly, Khia Johnson, Daniel Reisinger, and Oksana Tkachman (eds.), 2018. Grammatical periphery of Chontal Maya verb * Igor Vinogradov Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Abstract: This paper examines the formal structure of the grammatical tense/aspect/mood system in Chontal, a Mayan language from Mexico. The verbal grammar is analyzed as a continuum of semantically and morphosyntactically interrelated phenomena of different sorts, from fully grammaticalized (grammatical core) to those lexical items that may possibly be grammaticalized in the future (grammatical periphery). The distinction between grammatical core and periphery is not only important in order to represent in an appropriate way the internal architecture of a grammatical system, but can also help to better understand semantic properties of its structural components. The core elements are usually ambiguous and express very general meanings; the peripheral elements may optionally make them more precise, thereby disambiguating the utterance. Keywords: Chontal, Mayan languages, grammar, verbal complex, tense/aspect/mood systems 1 Introduction This paper has emerged from an obvious descriptive problem of mixing up language phenomena that have similar semantics, but that are completely different from the morphosyntactic point of view. This problem becomes particularly evident with tense/aspect/mood systems that typically represent a very heterogeneous functional domain. For instance, traditional grammars usually state that there are so many tenses or so many aspects in a particular language. However, such an analysis is not always accurate, because those tenses and aspects occupy different places within the verbal grammar and are not necessarily easily comparable with each other. Instead, the internal architecture of the grammatical system should be analyzed in order to find the interconnections between tense/aspect/mood markers and categories. I will illustrate this descriptive problem and its possible solution using the example of the verbal system of the Chontal language. Chontal (sometimes also called Chontal of Tabasco or “yokot’an”) is an endangered Mayan language spoken in the state of Tabasco, Mexico, by approximately 37,000 people (INEGI 2011). It belongs to the Cholan subgroup, together with two other languages, Chol and Ch’orti’. In the post-colonial period (16–18 th centuries), there were other Cholan languages, such as Cholti’, Chol Manché, and Chontal de Acalán, among others (see Becquey 2012; 2014), but they are now extinct. From the geographical point of view, Chontal is spoken in the Mayan Lowland area (Kroeber 1939; Law 2014), together with the other languages of the Cholan subgroup and the Yucatecan Mayan subgroup. The Chontal-speaking area is not dialectally homogeneous. Schumann (1978) distinguishes three main dialects: that of Nacajuca and Tapotzingo, that of Tamulté de las Sabanas and that of San Carlos; see also Knowles (1984) for some more specific considerations. The study is primarily based on the three most exhaustive language descriptions of Chontal produced to date, by Knowles (1984), Osorio May (2005), and Schumann (2012), respectively. I * I am grateful to the Program of Postdoctoral Fellowships at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Contact info: happyjojik@yandex.ru