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Agent Focus and Inverse in Tzotzil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Judith Aissen
Judith Aissen*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
*
Stevenson College, UCSC, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 [aissen@cats.ucsc.edu]
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Abstract

Many Mayan languages use a special verb form, the agent focus form, when extracting the subject of a transitive clause. These verbs have a cluster of properties that have resisted satisfactory analysis. This article suggests that in Tzotzil, agent focus verbs are inverse, in the sense of Algonquian linguistics, and that their distribution is determined by the relative obviation status of agent and patient. Evidence for the analysis comes from syntactic constraints on agent focus verbs and on their use in discourse. The properties of these verbs provide further evidence that obviation can play a central role in languages where it is not a morphological category.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 451 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Linguistic Society of America

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