K'iche' voice #

K'iche' (K'ichean Mayan) conjugates a transitive verb in five voices, which Mondloch's grammar presents lesson by lesson: the active, with subject, verb and object; the simple passive, which makes the object the subject of an intransitive conjugation and admits the agent only in the third person, in a phrase with the relational noun -umaal 'by'; the completed passive, which presents the state of the object resulting from the action; the absolutive antipassive, which drops the object or expresses it indirectly with ch-ee 'to', the verb conjugating as an intransitive; and the agent-focus antipassive, which keeps subject, verb and object and emphasizes the agent, and is the form the extraction of a transitive subject takes (Extraction.lean). The markers depend on the class of the verb. A derived transitive verb, with a polysyllabic vowel-final root, takes -j, -x, -taj, -n and -n, its two antipassives syncretic. A radical transitive verb, with a monosyllabic root ending in a consonant or a glottal stop, takes no suffix in the active and none in the simple passive, where a root ending in a consonant lengthens its vowel, and -Vtaj, -Vn and -Vw, with a copy or epenthetic vowel, in the other three. Can Pixabaj's sketch calls the completed passive the lexical passive and reports the same markers. A sixth voice, the instrumental, survives in remnants and is not covered.

Implementation notes #

The active and the simple passive of a radical verb have the empty marker: the active is the initial construction, and the simple passive is uncoded in Creissels's sense, told from the active by its intransitive conjugation, which the frame pair records. The vowel lengthening of a consonant-final root in the simple passive is a stem alternation the morph vocabulary does not express.

Main definitions #

Kiche.active, simplePassive, completedPassive, absolutiveAntipassive, agentFocus — the five voices of a verb of either class
Kiche.voices — the inventory of a class

Main results #

Kiche.isSymmetrical_iff — agent focus alone beside the active keeps both core terms core
Kiche.not_isTransitive_iff — the passives and the absolutive antipassive derive an intransitive construction
Kiche.marker_agentFocus_eq_iff — the two antipassives share a marker exactly on derived verbs

References #

source

def Kiche.active :

Mayan.VerbClass → Voice

The active: -j on a derived verb, no suffix on a radical one.

Equations

Instances For

source

def Kiche.simplePassive :

Mayan.VerbClass → Voice

The simple passive: -x on a derived verb; a radical verb takes no suffix and conjugates as an intransitive, a consonant-final root lengthening its vowel.

Equations