K'iche' and the Structure of Antipassive.

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.*