Editing Mayan languages (section)

===Statives and positionals===
In Mayan languages, statives are a class of [[predicate (grammar)|predicative]] words expressing a quality or state, whose syntactic properties fall in between those of verbs and adjectives in Indo-European languages. Like verbs, statives can sometimes be inflected for person but normally lack inflections for tense, aspect and other purely verbal categories. Statives can be adjectives, positionals or numerals.{{sfn|Coon|Preminger|2009}}

Positionals, a class of [[root (linguistics)|root]]s characteristic of, if not unique to, the Mayan languages, form stative adjectives and verbs (usually with the help of suffixes) with meanings related to the position or shape of an object or person. Mayan languages have between 250 and 500 distinct positional roots:{{sfn|Coon|Preminger|2009}}

{{quotation|'''''Telan''' ay jun naq winaq yul bʼe.''<br/>
::{{mono|1=There is a man '''lying down fallen''' on the road.}}

<br/>'''''Woqan''' hin kʼal ay max ekkʼu.''<br/>
::{{mono|1=I spent the entire day '''sitting down'''.}}

<br/>''Yet ewi '''xoyan''' ay jun lobʼaj stina.''<br/>
::{{mono|1=Yesterday there was a snake '''lying curled up''' in the entrance of the house.}}}}

In these three Qʼanjobʼal sentences, the positionals are ''telan'' ("something large or cylindrical lying down as if having fallen"), ''{{lang|kjb|woqan}}'' ("person sitting on a chairlike object"), and ''{{lang|kjb|xoyan}}'' ("curled up like a rope or snake").{{sfn|England|1994|p=87}}