The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

2.3.1.5 /#/. The glottal stop is a problematic segment in the Totonaco-Tepehua family. The
existence of phonemic glottal features is posited by Araña (1953:124) in the proto-language in
the form of laryngealized vowels. The writers of published grammars of all varieties have
struggled with the analysis of glottal features, which are variously accounted for as the phoneme
/?/, ejection on stops, laryngealization of vowels, and/or part of the vocalic nuclei, (either V?, ?V
or ?V?) (see Levy 1987:62-65 for an overview of vowel-related glottals). In Filomeno Mata
Totonac, the glottal stop exists primarily as an epenthetic segment at prosodic boundaries, but is
underlying in a very small number of lexical items. Glottal stop is inserted preceding all vowelinitial
roots and prefixes. This dissertation uses an apostrophe for transcribing glottal stops.
5) /aaksan/ 6) /lii-an/ 7) /kin-aqonqs"/
oak INSTR-go 1OBJ-braid
[’aaksán] [lee’en] [ki’aqóNqs"]
‘oak’ ‘s/he takes it’ ‘s/he braids my hair’
An epenthetic glottal stop also appears in citation form and pre-pausally, separating the two mora
of a final long vowel. §2.6.5.3 describes glottal stop epenthesis at word and phrase edges in
detail.
8) /quuluu/ 9) /c"aawilaa/ 10) /aq-siit-nii/
old man turkey HEAD-cut-AGNT
[q%oolú’u&] [c"aawilá’a&] [‘aqsiitní’i&]
‘old man’ ‘turkey’ ‘barber’
Morpheme-internally, glottal stop is extremely rare; it occurs in only four forms in my database:
11) Examples of morpheme-internal $
[sa’in] [c"aa’án]
‘rain’ ‘ant’
[-qe’e] [-qo’o]
MEANWHILE TOTALITIVE
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