Looking for a new participant. The purepecha passive

This paper deals with the passive suffix -na (or -ŋa) in Purepecha, an<br />isolate spoken in Michoacan, Mexico. The suffix serves to derive passives, causing the<br />valency of the predicate to be reduced by one participant. The syntactic effect is the<br />promotion of the patient of a transitive clause or the recipient of a ditransitive to subject of<br />the sentence. Until recently, the introduction of an agent was not possible. Nowadays,<br />however, some speakers find passive constructions with overt expression of agents<br />acceptable. The paper addresses two main topics: the behavior of subjects in both active<br />and passive constructions, and the different strategies for dealing with the reintroduction of<br />the old agent into the previous agentless passives