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Agent Focus in Mayan Languages

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Abstract

A subset of the Mayan languages makes use of a specific verb form if the subject of a transitive verb is to be focused, questioned or relativized; this form, which renders the verb morphologically intransitive, though semantically transitive, is called ‘agent focus’ among Mayanists. The respective Mayan languages differ in the morphosyntactic implementation of agent focus, i.e. the agreement patterns, the marking of the internal argument and the contexts in which agent focus occurs. The goal of this paper is to provide a lexical approach that accounts for the cross-Mayan variation by means of a small set of faithfulness and markedness constraints. It is proposed that the agent focus marker emerged as a means of disambiguation (by Bidirectional Optimization) and was grammaticalized, thus extending it to contexts where it is not needed and is even counterproductive in terms of the visibility of the arguments’ φ-features (person and number).

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  1. Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Jägerstr. 10-11, D-10117, Berlin, Germany

    Barbara Stiebels

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  1. Barbara Stiebels
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Correspondence to Barbara Stiebels.

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My sincere thanks go to the three anonymous reviewers whose stimulating, thorough and detailed (!) comments helped a lot to improve the paper and to revise my analysis. Of course, all remaining errors and inconsistencies are my responsibility. I am also very grateful to Rusty Barrett, Daniel Finer, and Nora England for answering my data questions. Furthermore, I would like to thank Dieter Wunderlich, Gerhard Jäger, Philippa Cook and the audiences in Potsdam, Berlin, Mainz and Mannheim for many helpful questions and suggestions. This research has been funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG; STI 151/2-1).

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Stiebels, B. Agent Focus in Mayan Languages. Nat Language Linguistic Theory 24, 501–570 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-005-0539-9

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