The Antipassive in Jacaltec: a Last Resort Strategy

Abstract

This paper gives reasons to recover the notion of «last resort» found in Chomsky (1991) by examining two uses of the antipassive suffix -ni in Jacaltec, an ergative Mayan language. This suffix is inserted as a last resortwhere UG makes the assignment of case to the object (transitive aspectless embedded clauses) and the extraction of the subject with ergative agreement (aspectual main clauses) otherwise impossible. Therefore, this notion cannot be restricted to instances of movement, as in Chomsky (1994). Rather, it must also include lexical insertion of affixal material in the derivation, as in the broader view found in Chomsky (1991).

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