in casual speech to jaʼan, jan or even an. To mark a contrastive topic, as in the English sentence "Michael I saw, but John (on the other hand) I did not," yan ("other") appears before the contrastive topic ("John" in the example), along with the pronoun -tukel: Te Petule, la jk-il; yan te Mikele, ma chiknaj s-tukel. ("I saw Petul, but Mikel, on the other hand, did not appear.") Focus Focus in Tzeltal behaves such that noun phrases are more or less focalized depending on their degree of predictability in a given context; noun phrases that are more surprising or unexpected in a given context will be said to be more marked for focus that those which are expected. Obviation The relative order of a verb and its active and patient arguments, and whether or not a passive construction may be used, can be affected by the definiteness and topicalization of the arguments. When the agent argument is a definite noun (phrase) and the patient argument is indefinite, only the active construction is grammatical. Thus, the Tzeltal equivalent of the phrase "The dog killed a cat" could not be expressed in the passive voice, because the agent "the dog" is definite but the patient "a cat" is indefinite. Inversely, if the patient is definite and the agent indefinite, the passive voice is grammatically required. Whereas an English speaker could say either "A boy hit Michael" or "Michael was hit by a boy," Tzeltal speakers are obligated to use the passive construct. References Further reading Gilles Polian. (2020). dictionaria/tseltal: Tseltal-Spanish multidialectal dictionary (Version v1.0.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. External links Agglutinative languages Mayan languages Mesoamerican languages Indigenous languages of Mexico