Antipassive and Possessor in Movima
Résumé
Movima, an unclassified language of lowland Bolivia, has a valency-decreasing particle kwey (or kaw) that can be combined with bivalent verbs and nouns likewise. A bivalent verb combined with this particle becomes monovalent, with the actor as the only core argument and the undergoer marked as oblique (i.e. antipassive). When a noun is combined with this particle, the referent is not the entity denoted by the noun anymore, but the possessor of that entity. This apparently heterogeneous effect of the particle kwey can be explained by the parallel syntactic properties of nouns and verbs: nouns, like verbs, can function as predicates, and verbs, like nouns, can occur in referential phrases; bivalent verbs are marked for person in the same way as possessed nouns, by a modifier-like element. The effect of kwey is to reduce the valency of bivalent words, which then denote the entity that is normally denoted by the pronominal modifier.