Agent focus and inverse in Tzotzil

Many Mayan languages use a special verb form, the AGENT FOCUS form, when extracting the subject of a transitive clause. These verbs have a cluster of properties that have resisted satisfactory analysis. This article suggests that in Tzotzil, agent focus verbs are INVERSE, in the sense of Algonquian linguistics, and that their distribution is determined by the relative OBVIATION status of agent and patient. Evidence for the analysis comes from syntactic constraints on agent focus verbs and on their use in discourse. The properties of these verbs provide further evidence that obviation can play a central role in languages where it is not a morphological category.*