UCLA

We give a description of the morphology and syntax of passive verbs in the Q’antel dialect of K’iche’, a Mayan language spoken in the department of Quetzaltenango (Aissen et al. 2017). Our description is based on two years of fieldwork carried out both ex situ and in situ, and is the first published work on the Q’antel dialect to our knowledge. We show that, like other dialects the Q’antel dialect has three formally- distinct patterns by which the passive is formed, each of which behave differently with regards to syntax and argument structure (Mondloch 1981). We further present new data about passives of intransitive verbs, ditransitive verbs, and verbs with anaphoric arguments. Last, we use these data to build towards an analysis that supports the traditional analysis of the passive, rather than the smuggling analysis presented in Collins 2005.