Abstract
The prevailing view of Agent Focus (AF) in Mayan linguistics is that it is a type of voice phenomenon. This paper examines AF in Yucatec, and argues that the phenomenon should be located instead in the typology of resumptive pronoun(RP)/gap alternations. The difference
between Yucatec, and other types of RP/gap alternating languages lies in the locus of the alternation. Rather than involve the presence or absence of an independent pronoun,
the alternation in Yucatec relates to two verb forms: one which carries a morphologically dependent subject pronoun, the other (the Agent Focus verb) which does not. This account correctly predicts patterns of variation found in this domain, which mirror cross-linguistically attested patterns of RP/gap distributions. I suggest that such patterns of variation can be understood from a functional perspective, emerging from the general processes that have been proposed to govern the choice and processing of referring expressions.
