Introduction

The form and function of antipassive and antipassive-like constructions in Mayan languages have been of formal and comparative interest to Mayanists for decades, notably since Thomas Smith-Stark's seminal paper in 1978 on “facts and fictions” about Mayan antipassives. This chapter builds on this tradition on two fronts: first, it revisits the descriptive data on the forms and functions of antipassive-related voice suffixes in Mayan languages to provide a more complete historical picture of how these morphemes evolved within the family. Second, it presents new synchronic data on Kaqchikel which track a merger in progress through a number of Kaqchikel dialects. In the dialects where this merger is taking place, a formerly robust morphological distinction is being neutralized, a process which is reflected in historical mergers elsewhere in the family. In a broader view, this type of investigation furthers our understanding of language change, and highlights some of the contributions that ongoing language documentation can make to historical linguistics.

Section 1 provides background information on the two markers that are the focus of this chapter and the various constructions in which they appear. Section 2 provides details on these markers and constructions in each branch of the Mayan language family, and discusses proposed reconstructions for the two markers in Proto-Mayan. Section 3 presents new data which demonstrate that a merger is taking place in some Kaqchikel dialects, and Section 4 concludes. Data on Kaqchikel are from the author's fieldwork unless otherwise cited, while data on other Mayan languages are assembled from the literature.

Forms

There are two verbal suffixes that consistently appear as markers of antipassive and antipassive-like constructions in Mayan languages. These have been reconstructed in Smith-Stark (1978: 179) as *-(V)w and *-(V)n, in Dayley (1983: 86–7) as *-w and *-(V)n, and in Kaufman (1986) as *-(o)w and *-(o-)an, which for the sake of convenience will be referred to here as *-(V)w and *-(V)n (see Section 2.8 for comments on these reconstructions). The forms of these two morphemes do not vary greatly among the Mayan languages that have them; as the parentheses imply, sometimes a vowel is present, and that vowel may be short or long (for example, -oon in Tz’utujil vs. -Vn in Sakapultek).