The status of syntactic ergativity in Kaqchikel

• Syntactic ergativity is not straightforwardly correlated with A’ extraction in Kaqchikel.
• Relative clauses have accusative alignment, and wh questions have ergative alignment.
• This is a typologically rare pattern among syntactically ergative languages.

This study investigates the nature of syntactic ergativity in the Mayan language Kaqchikel. Drawing on data from two production tasks, one designed to elicit relative clauses and the other to elicit wh questions, we show that despite its portrayal in the literature, Kaqchikel is not uniformly syntactically ergative with respect to A-bar extraction. Rather, its wh questions have ergative syntax, while its relative clauses exhibit nominative-accusative syntax. These findings contribute not only to the study of Mayan languages, but also to an understanding of the typology of ergativity in general.