Chapter 10. Agency and verb valence in Lachixío Zapotec

Mark A. Sicoli | Georgetown University

This paper draws on both elicited and conversational data to present the range of grammatical devices for marking agency and verb valence in Lachixío Zapotec, a West Zapotec language. In addition to syntactic valence related to the number of arguments taken by a verb as part of its argument structure, and the intransitive/transitive pairing of predicates related to causation, morphophonological and pronominal alternations in the language are shown to mark agency, defined as how active a subject is in producing an event or its outcome. This marking appeared invariant when elicited, but is shown to be varied creatively in conversational interaction.

Published online: 16 December 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.110.10sic

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