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K'ICHE' and The Structure of Antipassive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

William D. Davies  and
Luis Enrique Sam-Colop
William D. Davies*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
Luis Enrique Sam-Colop*
Affiliation:
SUNY Buffalo
*
Department of Linguistics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242
Department of English, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260
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Abstract

Verb agreement in the K'iche' agentive voice appears to deviate from the general ergative/absolutive system that K'iche' shares with other Mayan languages. This has led some to treat agreement in the agentive construction as falling outside the scope of the regular agreement system. It has also led to differing views regarding the appropriate syntactic representation of the agentive construction with respect to final transitivity vs. intransitivity. In this article we examine facts relevant to these issues and propose that the agentive voice is a detransitivizing antipassive construction. Recognition of this has the following consequences: (i) we can state a unified condition for the antipassive morphology, and (ii) we demonstrate that this nonregular agreement can be treated as a special case of the general K'iche' agreement system by adopting a lateral feature-passing analysis of the type proposed in Aissen 1987a. The proposed analysis also provides empirical justification for a heretofore somewhat weakly motivated claim of Relational Grammar, Postal's (1977) demotion analysis of antipassive.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 522 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

The spelling ‘K'iche’ rather than the more familiar ‘Quiche’ reflects the reformed spelling system recently proposed by the Mayan Languages Academy. This spelling system is used throughout for the K'iche' data. We would like to thank Judith Aissen, Stan Dubinsky, Nora England, Paul Postal, and Frank Trechsel for helpful and engaging comments of earlier drafts of this work. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

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