The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

When inceptive ta- and a body part prefix occur on a positional verb, they take scopal order, as
in ’aqa-ta-nuu ‘she puts it in her ear’ and ta-’aqa-nuu ‘she puts her ear in (the opening)’ (this is
covered more fully in §6.5.1.1).
5.4.4.2.2 Resultatives and ta-. In FM Totonac, a limited number of non-derived transitive verbs
accept the inceptive prefix. MacKay (1999) describes a similar phenomenon in Misantla
Totonaco as involving “accomplishment transitive verbs that denote actions or events resulting in
a change of state of the object” (1999:256). The group of transitives allowing inceptivization in
FM Totonac is somewhat broader. Although it includes some that meet MacKay’s criteria, such
as ‘fold’, ‘cut’, ‘detach’, ‘uproot’ ‘shave’, ‘stretch’, ‘break’, ‘peel’, ‘move’, ‘scrape’, ‘tie’,
‘cover’ and ‘change’, it also contains ‘poke’, ‘drag’, ‘inject’, and ‘squeeze’, where the change of
state of the object is less obviously salient. The semantically clearest examples are with the subclass
of cutting/breaking verbs:
190) Examples of cutting/breaking verbs
$ukú ‘he cuts it’ ta$ukú ‘it gets cut’
#tiit ‘s/ he tears it’ ta#tíit ‘it tears’
The inceptivizer in these cases has the same function as a passivizer.
5.4.4.2.3 Transitives and ta-. A relatively small group of inherently transitive roots is
detransitivized by affixation of ta-. Many of these verbs, like $uku ‘cut’, tuk# ‘break, snap’,
#laxa ‘loosen’ and #tonq ‘stretch’ are clearly resultatives, meaning that they describe the change
of state of an object. Others, such as saqa ‘drag’ and #toqo ‘inject’, would not be described as
resultatives in English or Spanish; it is unclear whether resultative semantics are part of their
meaning in FM Totonac. For this group of verbs, derivation with ta- gives a middle voice
reading of a verb of achievement, which is usually translated into Spanish using the impersonal
se construction. A list of all transitive verbs in my database that take the middle voice marker are
provided in Table 5.3
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