Nominalization in Q'anjob'al (Maya)

Q’anjob’al typically makes a rigid distinction between transitive and intransitive verb inflections. Transitive verbs cross-reference their subjects with an ergative prefix while intransitive verbs cross-reference their subjects with an absolutive prefix. Transitive verbs have one set of status suffixes, while intransitive verbs have a different set of status suffixes. However, an exception to this rule occurs in complement clauses that lack an aspect marker. Two phenomena are known: split ergativity and syntactic dependency (Francisco Pascual, 2007; and Mateo Toledo, 2008). In split ergativity, intransitive verbs take ergative cross-reference markers instead of absolutive markers, as in (1)a. In contrast, in syntactic dependency, transitive verbs in the same contexts bear the suffix -on but continue to cross-reference the subject and object via ergative and absolutive affixes, shown in (1)b.