The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

1.5.5 Variable affix order. Another very unusual phenomenon cross-linguistically is the robust
ability of certain verbal affixes in FM Totonac to occur in variable order with no scopal or
semantic difference (§6.2). For example, kii-kaa-lakaki!níi (RT-OBJ.pl-scold) ‘he goes to scold
them and returns’ is grammatical and semantically identical with kaa-kii-lakaki!níi (OBJ.pl-RTscold),
the latter with the morphemes in the expected order. Both prefixes and suffixes are
divided into three zones based on ordering possibilities: a fixed order zone adjacent to the root, a
middle zone of variable ordering, and another outermost fixed zone. The variably orderable
affixes in the middle zones on either side of the verb root are mostly derivational, but include one
person agreement prefix, as in the example above. Adjacent pairs of affixes may occur in
reversed order, and some affixes farther apart may be reordered. For all affixes there is a most
frequent order, which is the ‘standard’ order displayed in Appendix B and in all verb structure
charts in this dissertation.
1.5.6 Clitics vs. affixes. In FM Totonac it is often difficult to claim a meaningful distinction
between clitics and affixes. There are four diagnostics relevant to the language for determining
the status of a morpheme: whether it is selective in the part of speech to which it attaches;
whether it can carry primary stress; whether it is separated from the stem by a regular process of
nasal epenthesis, which occurs at word-word and clitic-stem boundaries; and whether it occurs
outside all affixes. Several morphemes are diagnosed inconsistently by these tests (§6.5.3.2). For
example, the aspectual morpheme –ku’u" appears to be an enclitic since it can attach to verbs,
nouns and adjectives, is subject to nasal epenthesis, and always takes final position, but it also
always takes primary stress. A set of deictic morphemes are separated from the stem by nasal
epenthesis, but can be stressed and occur inside person and aspect markers that meet all the tests
for affixes. This situation supports recent research by Bickel (2009), who concludes that
“Typologies based on ‘affixes’ or ‘clitics’ systematically underestimate true diversity.” It is more
sensible in FM Totonac to use a gradient scale of separability from the root to evaluate verbal
morphemes, rather than forcing them into the ‘clitic’ and ‘affix’ categories. The large number of
affixes and clitics are listed in Appendix A.
1.6 Archiving of materials. All materials relating to FM Totonac collected during my fieldwork
will be permanently archived at the University of California, Berkeley. The ten notebooks
transcribing elicitation sessions and narratives will be held by the Survey of California and Other
Indian Languages, and the approximately 200 microdisks of recordings by the Berkeley
Language Center. Access will be unrestricted.
1.7 Structure of dissertation. The rest of this dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 2
describes the phonology and morphophonology of FM Totonac; Chapter 3, the nominal
morphology, covering nouns, pronouns, demonstratives and adjectives; Chapter 4, the
inflectional verbal morphology; Chapter 5, the derivational verbal morphology; and Chapter 6,
the position class and hierarchical structure of the verb.
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