The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

6.2.1 Methodology. Because the variable affix order described here is unusual crosslinguistically,
and because the data-gathering techniques employed were necessarily somewhat
problematical, I will describe my methodology in detail.
I became aware of the possibility of variation when attempting to discover the exact order of the
many verbal affixes. A consultant would provide me a verb with the affixes in one order, either
during elicitation or in a narrative, and later give the same verb with the affix order reversed, or
one consultant would give a different affix order than another consultant. Occasionally a speaker
would spontaneously offer two different forms as a translation of the same Spanish phrase, for
example h-kii-kaa-$eqeé-w (1SUB.exc-RT-LOC-wash-1pl) and h-kaa-kii-$eqeé-w (1SUB.exc-
LOC-RT-wash-1pl) (4,82 magc) for ‘we went, cleaned the place and returned’, with the roundtrip
and locative morphemes reversed. When I asked about the discrepancy, they would often tell
me ‘es igual’—‘it’s the same’. This led me to try to discover the limits of affix variability.
Because of the large number of verbal morphemes that may co-occur, and the extremely low
probability of all possible combinations occurring in natural speech or narratives available to me,
I decided to systematically elicit every combination of semantically compatible affix pairs, both
derivational and inflectional. I therefore prepared two Spanish sentences for every affix pair that
would elicit the target combination, and separately asked two consultants, JSF and MJL, to
interpret one set of sentences in FM Totonac. Many of these attempts failed to elicit the target,
but eventually I gathered two sentences for every affix combination. Then, on different days, I
presented each of these Totonac verbs with the target affixes in reverse order separately to JSF
and MJL, and asked them what they meant. That is, each speaker was asked about all of the
sentences elicited from both. When context had been necessary to elicit the original sentence, I
provided that context to the consultant when asking for the meaning. Later I did the same with a
third set of sentences and the same two consultants, and less systematically with many other
verbs and one or the other speaker. I also presented each of them with the verbs with reverse
order affixes that I found in free narratives and asked their meaning. Whatever their response to
the reverse affix order verb, I then asked about the equivalent verb with the affixes in standard
order. This process was accomplished over several field visits of 2-5 weeks in length in 2006 and
2007. I also elicited some forms with three or more affixes in various free orders, but I found the
results questionable, with consultants rapidly losing their ability to judge the grammaticality of
such forms. I therefore excluded such forms from the results reported here. I did occasionally
find a spontaneous form in a narrative with permutations involving more than two affixes, such
as:
1) kaataalaaliipín’a&
/kaa-taa-laa-lii-pin-aa-[cg]/
OBJ.pl-COM-REC-INST-go2-IMPF-2SUB.sg
‘you get along with them’ (5,177 mjl)
(standard order would be:
OBJ.pl-REC-INST-COM)
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