Ergativity in the Mayoruna branch of the Panoan family

The present paper describes the ergative alignment patterns in the extant languages of the Mayoruna branch: Matses, Matis, Kulina, Dëmushbo, and Chankuëshbo/Korubo. The patterns that emerge from the present comparative study suggest that the Mayoruna languages, particularly Matses, are in the process of developing more uniform ergatively-aligned morphology. The alignment patterns in these languages vary in several details, but overall are found to be much more similar to each other than they are to other Panoan languages, thereby supporting the hypothesis that the languages in the Mayoruna branch compose a linguistic subfamily.