Perception verb complements in Akatek, a Mayan language

122 4. AKATEK, A `TYPICAL' MAYAN LANGUAGE
(78) tol i'-b'il-;
s-paj jun juun
because carry-PASS/PF-B3 A3-reply one paper
tu' w-uu
DEM A1-by
`Because the reply to the letter has been brought byme.' Penalosa & Say (1992)
17. `Passive' is generally marked in the verbal morphology.
This has already been illustrated in examples (76), (77), and
(78).
18. VOS languages generally do not have overt copulas.
There are no copulas in Akatek. To indicate person and
number, set B a xes are simply su xed to nouns and adjectives
as illustrated with the adjective ikis `alive' in example (78).
(79) aw-uu xan ikis-on on
A2-by thus alive-B1p CL1p
`Because of you, we are alive.' Penalosa & Say (1992)
Similar to the VOS language Tzeltal, the VXY language Akatek
conforms to almost all of the syntactic properties of VOS languages
established in Keenan (1978). The only two exceptions are causatives
and postpositions. It appears that Keenan's generalizations can be extended
to VXY and VSO languages, even though I have not shown this
for a VSO language. The fact that Akatek conforms to the syntactic
characteristics of VOS languages supports the reconstruction of proto
Mayan word order as VOS where marked Os are reordered to VSO.
The cross-linguistic realization of case and agreement marking and
its instantiation in Mayan languages is the topic of the following section.
The investigation of case and agreement marking is a prerequisite to
the analysis of Mayan languages within grammatical relations typology
which follows in section 2.5.
2.3. Case and agreement marking. Based on Croft (1990),
I de ne case and agreement marking in the following way:
1. A case marker is a morpheme that refers to the grammatical
relation that holds between the noun phrase and the verb.
2. Agreement is a morpheme that refers to the subject (DO, IO,
Oblique) itself.
Both case and agreement marking express a relation between two
entities (Croft, 1988). Case marking is a relational strategy, it establishes
the link between noun phrase and verb. Agreement marking, on