The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

Chapter 4 Verbal Inflection
4.1 Introduction. This chapter provides an overview of the complex inflectional verbal
morphology of FM Totonac, which marks the categories of tense, aspect, mood, subject and
object. The discussion will limit itself to the functional and semantic aspects of verbal inflection,
with a similar treatment of verbal derivation to follow in Chapter 5. Linear (position class) and
hierarchical aspects of verbal structure will be considered in Chapter 6. This organizational
structure is not meant to imply that inflection and derivation are always easily separable
categories; FM Totonac has its share of complications in this regard, including aspect markers
that occur inside derivational ones, and derivational suffixes whose choice of allomorph is
determined by the subject. These issues are left for Chapter 6, however, and the division in
Chapters 4 and 5 is made by labelling all and only those categories obligatorily marked on verbs
as inflection. This chapter begins with a general description of verbal organization and verb
classes, then addresses the inflectional system. Appendix A contains a list of all affixes and
clitics discussed in this chapter.
4.2 Overall verb structure. The morphologically complex FM Totonac verb has at its center a
stem that may be simple, compound and/or derived. The minimal structure of a verb is:
Table 4.1 Minimal verb structure
TENSE/MOOD—PERSON—STEM—ASPECT—PERSON
The stem may be a single or a compound root, and may include one or more derivational affixes.
Tense and mood morphemes appear preceding the stem, aspect morphemes follow the stem, and
person agreement (subject and object) is marked by both prefixes and suffixes. The status of
tense and mood markers as clitics vs. prefixes will be explored in §6.5.3.2.
The depiction in Table 4.1 is somewhat simplistic in several ways: subject is sometimes realized
by morphological processes other than affixation; mood, aspect and person markers occur in
multiple positions interspersed with one another; some aspect and person affixes are combined in
one position; and certain aspect suffixes precede some derivational suffixes, that is, inflection is
not always peripheral to the stem. These complications will receive further treatment in Chapter
6. The complete verb structure is displayed in Appendix B.
As in other Totonac varieties, all verbs in FM Totonac fall into three phonotactic categories,
depending on whether they end in a vowel, -n, or a non-nasal obstruent. Unlike with other
varieties, however, these phonotactic groupings do not require positing different inflectional
classes. All FM Totonac verbs inflect in the same way, subject however to regular phonological
rules, such as nasal deletion (see §2.6.1.1), that result in surface differences.
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