The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

86) kintaamaamoqós in kiw’i&
/kin-taa-maa-moqos kiw’i&/
1OBJ-COM-CAUS-fall pole
‘he made me fall pole and all’
87) kintakiitaatamáawa
/kin-ta-kii-taa-tamaawa-li&/
1OBJ-3SUB.pl-RT-COM-buy-PFTV
‘they went with me to buy it’
88) tataamaqníi
/ta-taa-maq-nii-aa/
3SUB.pl-COM-CAUS-die-IMPF
‘they kill her with him’
89) kinkiitaaláaqtsi
/kin-kii-taa-laaqtsin-li&/
1OBJ-RT-COM-see-PFTV
‘he went to see her with me’
90) kinkaataamuuxúun
/kin-kaa-taa-maa-xuu-ni&/
1OBJ-OBJ.pl-COM-CAUS-inside-2OBJ
‘he helped us put it in’
Comitative applicatives, then, add a secondary ‘subject’ that has object properties equal to those
of the base object in transitive clauses, as indicated by the object agreement affixes. The
comitative object almost always has a human referent, thus confirming Peterson’s findings that
animacy and object properties tend to coincide in applicative objects. Because the interactions of
the comitative with imperfective and perfective aspect and person agreement marking are not
always as expected from compositional morphosemantics, Table 5.1 displays all possible
combinations of these morphemes with the suppletive verb min/tan ‘come’. The glosses translate
the ‘Present imperfective’ column; ‘came’ should be substituted for ‘come’ to gloss the ‘Present
perfective’ column. It is noteworthy that in all comitative forms inflected with the first person
object marker, the voiceless vowel of –w! becomes post-aspiration on the w. This is not found in
non-comitative forms.
! ")-!