The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

14) ki-na-piipí-n’i&
1POSS-PL-older.sister-PL
‘my older sisters’
15) ki-na-kuku-nii-n-kán
1POSS-PL-uncle-PL-ep-PL.POSS
‘our uncles’
16) mi-na-taaláa-n
2POSS-PL-sibling-PL
‘your siblings’
17) s%-na-taqo-nii-n-kán
3POSS-PL-grandmother-PL-ep-PL.POSS
‘their grandmothers’
3.3.3 Body part prefixes. The body part prefixes which are so productive in verbal derivation
may also be affixed to nouns and adjectives to derive nominals with a more specific or
lexicalized meaning.
3.3.3.1 Nouns and body part prefixes. Any discussion of the ‘genius’ of FM Totonac must
include a lengthy section on the body part prefixes (BPP), which are very frequently affixed to
all word classes (see §5.4.2.5 for BPPs and verbs) to derive transparently compositional or
lexicalized forms. The BPPs may directly refer to the body part in question, or to an extended
semantic field that is body part-like in some way, usually shape, e.g., the ‘belly’ of a pot, the
‘face’ of a house (see Levy 1999). The prefixes are usually formal truncations of the independent
body part nouns, for example ’aq#áaq! ‘head’, ’aq- HEAD-. Many nouns are derived with body
part prefixes and generally also refer to parts of the body; some examples are given in Table 3.7.
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