(though recall that those same affixes are used in other grammatical constructions, such as possession). The systematic appearance of one personal marker per argument means that corresponding arguments need not be realized as noun phrases, but can be implied when corresponding to an unmarked topic. The two following examples illustrate both scenarios: La s-tsʼun ixim te h-bankile. ("My older brother sowed some corn.") La s-tsʼun. ("He sowed it.") The la marks the verb in the perfective aspect. In both examples, the transitive verb tsʼun ("sow") takes two personal affixes, the third-person ergative prefix s- and the third-person absolutive, -Ø. In sentence 1, both because of the semantic nature of the verb meaning "sow" and because VOS is the "unmarked" constituent order, we assume that ixim ("corn") is the object of the verb, and h-bankile ("my-older brother") the subject. In sentence 2, neither the object nor the subject argument appears as a noun phrase; Tzeltal almost never uses pronouns as unmarked topics. The presence of two affixes completes the meaning of the transitive predicate, without the need, as in English, for separate deictic arguments. Because of this paradigm, a transitive verb with both third-person affixes appearing only with one argument (noun phrase) can be ambiguous: La y-il(-Ø) te achʼixe (il, "see" and te achʼixe, "the girl") could mean either "The girl saw it/him/her," or "He/she saw the girl," because the noun phrase te achʼixe could be either the subject or object. However, in the case of passive phrases, the semantic agent may appear unmarked, while the absolutive suffix is preceded by the passive suffix, -ot: Tiʼ-ot(-Ø) tsʼiʼ te Mikel ("Mikel was bitten by a dog"; the verb takes only the absolutive person marker -Ø, while, the agent tsʼiʼ ("dog") doesn't correspond to an ergative person marker on the verb.) With ditransitive verbs, marked with the applicative suffix -b, the indirect object corresponds to an absolutive marker, while the direct object goes unmarked: La h-man-b-at tumut ("I bought you some eggs"; man ("buy") is marked with the first-person ergative prefix corresponding to "I," and with the second-person ergative suffix corresponding to "you," while tumut ("egg") goes unmarked.) Polian (2006) provides the following table showing the relative frequencies of various constituent orders occurring with transitive, active verbs (in which V represents the verb, A the semantic agent or subject, and P the semantic passive or object): As the three most frequent constructions omit