Joshua Lieberstein

About

• Read more in my recent interview with UCSC's Humanities Institute!

• View the full manuscript here

Outside of linguistics, I am an aspiring musician, avid dancer and lover of nature.

Research

Negation and Irreality in K'iche'

• email me for a draft of the manuscript

Speech Reporting in K'iche'

• to appear in the 28th Proceedings of the Workshop on American Indigenous Languages; email me for the manuscript

Consonant Sequences in Chichicastenango K'iche'

In joint work with Elizabeth Wood, we investigated whether consonant sequences in the Chichicastenango variety of K'iche' are clusters or separate syllables. The dialect has pervasive vowel deletion and consonant sequences are present both word-initially and word-internally. Using data collected from acoustic experiments in the field, we found that consonant sequences in K'iche' behave as two separate syllables; they do not function as clusters, like e.g. English /sp/ in the word spit. This work provides one of the first acoustic experiments on a Mayan language that investigates syllable structure, and provides the surprising result that 'appendix' consonants can exist word-medially.

Polarity, Ellipsis and Verb-Initial Order in K'iche'

• email me for a recent handout

Ambiguity Advantage Effect in Wh-Questions

• Published in the 2026 edition of UGA Working Papers

Fieldwork

K'iche' is a Mayan language spoken in the highlands of Guatemala by around a million speakers but this number is rapidly declining due to globalization and pressures to speak Castellano and English. I work primarily with speakers from Chichicastenango, an understudied dialect with a vastly different phonology and syntax from the varieties of K'iche' that have been studied to date. My field work focuses on theoretically informed description of the language within the generativist framework, with the end goal of providing resources not only to the linguistic community but to the local community as well.

Apart from my theoretical work on K'iche', I believe that to document and study an indigenous language one must understand the culture as well. To that end I also document the spiritual practices of the ajq'ijab', those who count the days and serve as spiritual guides in their communities. I believe that a deep understanding of the circumstances that a language came to be can help us better understand the syntax and lexicon, providing valuable insights into the inner-workings of the language.

Resources

• Learn K'iche'!
• English-K'iche' Dictionary
• Diccionario K'iche' a Español

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';