Third-Person Agreement and Passive Marking in Tacanan Languages: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

The five Tacanan languages (Amazonian Bolivia and Peru)—Araona, Cavineña, Ese Ejja, Reyesano, and Tacana—have a conspicuously similar verbal suffix -ta (or -ka in one dialect of Ese Ejja). Depending on the language and the transitivity of the verb stem it attaches to, this suffix is used either to refer to a third-person plural S argument or a third-person singular or plural A argument, or to mark a passive derivation. In this paper, I argue that the suffixes are all historically related and that they come from a single source: a third-person plural suffix *-ta. I also suggest that this marker could have originated in a third-person plural independent pronoun that I reconstruct as **tuna.