Grammaticalization of tense/aspect/mood marking in Yucatec Maya

Maybe the most pervasive among the changes analyzable as cases of grammaticalization in the languages of the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan stock is the formation of auxiliaries that allow finer tense/aspect/mood distinctions than the status suffixes inherited from Proto-Maya. It has been continually productive since colonial times. While this amounts to a replacement of the status system, it follows strictly language-internal patterns. And while the source constructions form a rather heterogeneous set, they converge onto a common TAM auxiliary pattern in Modern Yucatecan.