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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Thursday, October 30, 12 noon in 460-126:
The 'Agent Focus' voice in Mayan languages
Judith Tonhauser (Stanford University)
Mayan languages have a rich voice system which includes the active,
passive, middle
and antipassive voice. More than half of the 29 Mayan languages realize an
additional
voice, the so-called 'Agent Focus' voice, in content questions, focus
constructions, and
relative clauses. My aim in this talk is to provide an explanation for why
an additional voice
occurs in this particular set of constructions, and what the function of
this voice is.
My explanation for Yucatec Maya is based on the particular way in which
voice and argument
realization interact with the discourse status of event participants in
Yucatec Maya. In
particular, my proposal is based on the following two (independent)
findings: (i) a transitive
verb can only be realized in the transitive active voice if the agent is
the current discourse
topic, and, (ii) the constructions in which the 'Agent Focus' voice occurs
realize a 'focus' event
participant. Since a 'focus' event participant cannot be the discourse
topic in Yucatec Maya, a
consequence of (i) and (ii) is that the transitive active voice cannot be
used to realize a 'focus'
event participant that is the agent of a transitive verb. Hence, I argue
that the Yucatec Mayan
'Agent Focus' voice (which serves to realize 'focus' event participants
that are agents of transitive
predications) 'fills a gap' in the voice system of this language.
In the remainder of the talk I discuss the wider implications of this
analysis. I examine the extent to
which my analysis of the 'Agent Focus' voice can account for the 'Agent
Focus' voice of other Mayan
languages, and to what extent it helps understand the historical
development of the Proto-Mayan
'Agent Focus' voice to the individual Mayan languages (including those
Mayan languages which don't
have an 'Agent Focus' voice anymore).
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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