The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

It appears that the glottal stop is being relegated to the primary role of prosodic boundary marker
in FM Totonac. Of the four forms with morpheme-internal $, one, sa’in, is pronounced by many
speakers as sayín. It is possible that $aa’án ‘ant’ is actually a bimorphemic word ($aa ‘leg’ and
’án ‘go’), in which case there are no content words with a robust morpheme-internal $. The
glottal stop internal to the two suffixes -qe’e and -qo’o is not heard unless these morphemes
occur prepausally, or is heard only as creaky voice on the surrounding vowels; its presence is
historical and is inferred synchronically by the stress behavior of words containing these
morphemes (see §2.7.2).
2.3.2 Affricates. Following Sagey (1986), I analyze each of the three affricates as single
segments with a sequence of +continuant/-continuant features, specifically coronal stop-coronal
fricative. They pattern with the stops in terms of processes affecting the left edge, for example,
homorganic nasal assimilation and postlexical nasal epenthesis, which occur only preceding
word-initial stops and affricates (see §2.6.1.1.2 and §2.6.5.2). The affricates pattern with the
fricatives in observing the fricative harmony constraint, which disallows different fricatives
within a single morpheme (although there are four exceptions--see §2.5.3).
The affricates do not enter into tautomorphemic initial consonant clusters, although like all other
segments, they can combine with the prefixes k- and #-, as in k$ux ‘I spit’, or #tsiits’i" ‘his/her
rash’. In final clusters, only the nasal-affricate -nts and –n$ are possible, with the exception of
the unusual cluster ending paq"$! ‘tomato’. Sections 2.5.1 and 2.5.2 provide more details on
affricates in consonanant clusters. All of the affricates have roles in sound symbolism (see §2.8).
2.3.2.1 /ts/. /ts/ is a voiceless coronal affricate whose closure portion is a dental stop and whose
release portion is an alveolar fricative. It is likely that this phoneme can only appear morphemeinitially;
since all the morpheme-final examples of ts are glottalized, they may be related to the
enclitic =ts’ ‘YA’.
12) Examples of /ts/
[tsaa#] ‘net’ [tsaqts’] ‘corn on the cob’
[t%aa#ts’] ‘seed’ [tsumuxáat h i&] ‘girl’
[k%tsukú] ‘I begin’ [’aqtsú’u&] ‘short’
[s"tsiits’i&] ‘his/her rash’ [waayants’] ‘s/he eats already’
2.3.2.2 /c!/. The voiceless coronal affricate, /c"/, has a dental stop in the closure portion is and an
alveopalatal fricative in the release portion.
! "(!