The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

92) "aakatsiiní
/#aa=katsii-nii-aa/
NEG-know-DAT-IMPF
‘he doesn’t know it’
93) puuwaníi
/puu-wan-nii-aa/
LOC-say-DAT-IMPF
‘he thinks about her’
94) kintanúuni
/kin-ta=núu-nii-aa #tukúun’i&/
1OBJ-enter-DAT thorn
‘a thorn got stuck in (entered) me’
95) kinqas%patníiy’a&
/kin-qas"pat-nii-aa-[cg]/
1OBJ-hear-DAT-IMPF-2SUB.sg
‘you hear me’
With transitive verbs, the dative –nii generally adds an additional theme or benefactive
argument, creating a ditransitive verb. FM Totonac appears to disallow ditransitive forms in
which both objects are speech act participants. This may be related to the pragmatic skewing
noted by Heath (1998) in many American languages when both subject and object are non-third
person. This means that, since one of the objects of a FM Totonac ditransitive is always third
person, -nii is systematically interpreted as marking a third person object on a ditransitive. As
noted in §4.8.2, there is no formal means of mapping each object separately to its referent. An
example such as 97 below can be read as ‘he takes care of her for me’ or ‘he takes care of me for
her’. The same ambiguity is possible with each of the other examples; it is context or pragmatics
that disambiguates such cases.
96) kwáni
/k-wan-nii-li&/
1SUB-say.it-DAT-PFTV
‘I said it to him’
! "*#!