Antipassive Constructions in the Maya Glyphic Texts A lfonso L acadena Abstract The Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts of the Southern Lowlands provide morphological and syntactic evidence for antipassive constructions. Two sets of signs, wa/wi and ni, are involved in the relevant spellings, probably render- ing suYxes of the shape -(V)w and -(V)n. These two suYxes are related to attested Tzeltalan and Ch’olan antipassive suYxes, and they have ancestors reconstructible for proto-Greater Tzeltalan. Other Mayan languages outside Greater Tzeltalan also have cognate -(V)w and -(V)n antipassive suYxes. The proto-Mayan ancestors have been reconstructed as *-(V)w and *-(V)n (Smith- Stark 1978) or *-(o)w ~ *-(a)w and *-o-an ~ *-an (Kaufman 1986). 1. Introduction In the early eighties, shortly after linguists had identiﬁed antipassive construc- tions as a voice category in the Mayan languages, people began to look for these kinds of constructions in the grammar of the glyphic texts. MacLeod 1984 and Bricker 1986 explicitly mention glyphic antipassive constructions. More recently, Stephen Houston (in Martin 1997: 855–56) has made an important identiﬁcation, interpreting certain verbal expressions occurring in pottery texts as antipassives — or more precisely, object-incorporation Written Language and Literacy Vol. 3(1), 2000, 155–180 © John Benjamins Publishing Co.