The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

Peterson (1999) predicts that the instrumental is less likely than the benefactive or comitative
applicatives to take over object marking from the direct object; in fact, it seems to be marked on
the verb with object affixes in FM Totonac only when the referent is human. This can be seen in
example 114 above, in which the first person object prefix marks the instrumental object, and in
example 111, where the dative marks the third person object. (This may be an artifact of
insufficient data and needs confirmation through additional research; it may simply result from
the fact that third person objects are zero-marked.)
Unlike the comitative and the dative, the instrumental does not always serve as an applicative. In
some cases intransitives derived with the instrumental show no increase in valence, but merely
have what would be a prepositional phrase in English added to their meaning. In these cases the
instrumental object usually has an inanimate referent. Note that in example 112, which does have
a human referent, the dative suffix does not appear marking the additional object on the verb.
This may indicate that the instrumental NP has not become a core argument, or may simply be
related to the lack of compositionality of this derived word. Some instrumentalized intransitive
examples follow:
120) kliiwáka máalakci&
/k-lii-waka-aa maalakc"i&/
1SUB-INST-up-IMPF
‘I lean up against the door’
121) liipas%awá
/lii-pas"awa-aa/
INST-content-IMPF
‘she becomes happy because of . . .’
122) kliitamóqos"i c%íwis
/k-lii-ta-moqos-li& c"íwis"/
1SUB-INST-INC-fall-PFTV
‘I fell because of a stone’
123) kliiláma n kintéko
/k-lii-la-maa kin-teko/
1SUB-INST-live-PROG 1POSS-father
‘I am living for my father’
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