Grammatical properties of experiencers in Yucatec Maya

Elisabeth Verhoeven
University of Erfurt


The organization of grammatical relations in Yucatec Maya is still an unsettled question. As regards coding properties, Yucatec Maya shows a split-intransitive system of argument marking, depending on overt aspect-mood marking on the verb. In incompletive aspect, S is marked like A, while in completive and subjunctive, S is marked like P. Behavioral properties, however, seem to point at a weakly pronounced S=A subject.
There are different patterns of experiencer coding in Yucatec Maya, the basic ones being possessor of a relational or body part noun, and main argument (S) of a stative predicate. Other patterns include A of transitive verbs, P with causative transitive verbs, S with intransitive verbs, G with some modals and some basic intransitive verbs.
It will be shown that, just as in Indo-European, Yucatec Mayan ‘downgraded’ experiencers generally do not have access to syntactic pivothood (contrary to corresponding experiencers in some other languages/language families (e.g. Lezgian, Haspelmath 1993, 2001; Tibeto-Burman, Bickel 2001). Possessor experiencers may, however, function as controllers of equi-deletion in subordinated clauses, a feature that distinguishes them from canonical possessors. At the same time, there is no syntactic evidence that A and S experiencers behave differently from canonical A and S arguments in the language.
The paper presents a comprehensive account of the grammatical behavior of experiencers in Yucatec Maya and draws conclusions as to their grammatical prominence in the language.