The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

I categorized the responses of each consultant for each sentence into four classes, whether the
verbs with normal and reverse affix order were: 1. grammatical and with the same meaning; 2.
ungrammatical but easily interpretable with the intended meaning; 3. interpretable with a
different meaning (usually due to affix homonymy, which is rampant in the language); or 4.
uninterpretable. My consultants’ responses were not always consistent from day to day, with
each other, or with different verb stems with the same affix pair. However, whenever I received
the 1. grammatical/same meaning response more than twice for a particular affix combination,
and no 3. interpretable/ different meaning or 4. uninterpretable responses, I counted that reverse
order of affixes as grammatical. The results are detailed in subsections §6.2.4 and §6.2.5.
The flaws in this method of data collection are obvious, particularly using mostly elicited
material and only two consultants for the bulk of the work. There is undoubtedly a correlation
between the difficulty of obtaining good data of this kind and the rarity of documented instances
of the variable ordering phenomenon cross-linguistically. It is clear that an unusual phenomenon
is at work here, and a great deal more research to elucidate the scope and nature of free affix
order is needed. It will be extraordinarily time-consuming to do the work, but what is needed is a
massive collection of free narrative to capture naturally occurring affix pairs, as well as the
elicitation and testing of the grammaticality of reverse order forms with a much larger number of
speakers. In addition, free affix ordering with three or more affixes deserves study; although I
discarded my elicited results in this area because of methodological problems, such forms do
occur naturally on occasion.
6.2.2 Limitations on variable affix ordering. Several factors seem to inhibit the reordering of
affixes, the clearest one being ambiguity avoidance. Many homophonous affixes exist in FM
Totonac, including "aa=, NEG and relativizer ‘where’; kaa-, object plural and locative; ta-
3SUB.plural and inceptive/middle voice; puu-, instrumental and locative; maq-, associative,
causative, and BPP ‘body’; maqa-, causative and BPP ‘face’; lak- BPP ‘leg’ and distributive; -
nii, dative and perfective aspect (short form) and –ni dative (short form) and 2 object. My
consultants would often find reversing the order of affixes less felicitous when an affix thereby
appeared on the same side of another affix as a homophonous one. That is, given standard order
X1YZX2, affix X1 is less likely to move to the right of Y given the homophonous affix X2 with
which it might be confused, depending on the semantics of the entire stem. For example,
associative maq- (position 6), would be likely to be interpreted as the body part prefix if it moved
rootward of position 5, and the interpretation of it as the associative would be rejected; similarly
if object plural kaa- (position 11) appeared inward of instrumental lii- (position 8), thus
becoming confusable with the homophonous locative.
Another factor seemed to be the semantic likelihood of an affix appearing with a certain root; if a
body part prefix commonly appeared with a certain verb root like skaak ‘dry’, then maq- would
be more likely to be interpreted as the BPP ‘body’ with that root than as the associative,
especially if it occurred closer to the root than when in standard order. Other factors undoubtedly
exist that limit or facilitate the order reversal of affixes; this is an area that deserves further study.
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