RASAL Lingüística

Issue 2024 - Vol. 1
Dossier

Between passives and impersonals: clauses involving -wa in Yaqui

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  • Lilián Guerrero,
  • Valeria Belloro
Lilián Guerrero
Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas / UNAM
Valeria Belloro
Facultad de Lenguas y Letras / UAQ
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56683/rs241024

Published 2024-03-18

Keywords

  • voice alternation,
  • passive,
  • impersonal,
  • Yaqui,
  • Uto-Aztecan

How to Cite

Guerrero, L., & Belloro, V. (2024). Between passives and impersonals: clauses involving -wa in Yaqui. RASAL Lingüística, (1), 97–118. https://doi.org/10.56683/rs241024

Copyright (c) 2024 Lilián Guerrero, Valeria Belloro

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Yaqui (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico) has several morphological mechanisms to encode voice changes, including the suffix -wa, a morpheme that has not been fully analyzed. This study examines the basic properties of clauses involving -wa in Yaqui based on oral texts and discusses some aspects of their structure and interpretation. The data show that clauses involving -wa function as promotional as well as non-promotional passive constructions depending on the status of the P argument, nominative in promotional passives, accusative in non-promotional ones. Plural patients neutralize case distinctions, and the function of P cannot be determined. Clauses involving -wa are also possible with intransitive verbs and dicendi verbs, forming non-promotional passives. In all cases, the omission of the A argument is obligatory. These clauses are more frequent in life stories than in other discourse genres, and are typically associated with a P argument serving as a continuous topic affected by the actions of the omitted A, whose identity can nevertheless be inferred and correlates with authority figures.

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