The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

151) puuwán
/puu-wan-aa/
LOC-say.it-IMPF
‘he says it over a loudspeaker’
The use of locatives as applicatives is very limited. Like the instrumental, the locatives may
affix to both transitive and intransitive verbs with no increase in valence, simply licensing an
oblique argument. With a small number of positionals and intransitives, the locatives do serve as
applicatives, transitivizing the verbs by promoting an oblique to a core argument. Locative
objects are the least likely of all applicative objects to have animate referents, and as expected,
they are least likely to take object marking.
5.4.2.5 Body Part Prefixes (BPP). Body part prefixes, of which more than 35 are documented in
my database, occasionally serve as applicatives in FM Totonac. The BPPs are phonologically
reduced forms of the full body part nouns that can refer to the part in question, but that also often
have semantically extended reference. As Gerdts writes of the lexical suffixes of Halkomelem,
“they are polysemous morphemes showing an elaborate network of semantic extensions” (Gerdts
2004:231). In FM Totonac, the metaphorical extensions include for example, laka- ‘face’ or any
vertical surface such as a wall or door; ki"- ‘mouth’ or any round opening, like that of a jar; paa-
‘belly’ or the interior of anything, like a bowl, or the widest part of objects like roads or rivers;
tan’- ‘posterior’ or the lower part of anything, such as the bottom of a chair. Some body part
terms are metaphorical in themselves, being recursively composed of body terms, such as tankilh-
‘posterior+mouth=hip’ and tuu-pis'- ‘foot+neck=ankle’. While the BPPs have only
occasional use as applicatives, they are ubiquitous in the language. In any context in which a
body part or a metaphorical extension of one is present or implied, verbs, nouns and adjectives
will be derived with the appropriate body part prefix.
Table 5.2 provides a list of many of the FM Totonac BPPs. Some prefixes with a velar segment
have a uvular allomorph that are affixed to roots containing a uvular segment (see the discussion
of uvular harmony in §2.6.2.1). Unusually, the BPP tan- ‘rear, bottom’ from tan’ sometimes
appears as tank- or tanq-, inserting a harmonic dorsal to replace the glottalization of the final
sonorant which cannot occur word-internally. In most cases the harmonious morphemes differ
only in the velar/uvular segment, such as HAND maka-/maqa, but a few also have vocalic
differences, such as MOUTH kil-/qal-.
Table 5.2 Body part prefixes
BPP Full noun Gloss
’ak- ’aqs"áaqa head
’aqa- taqéen ear
! "+'!