The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

Vowels never occur word-initially; a glottal stop is always epenthesized preceding the vowel.
Vowel hiatus is never found, so that phonemes with different qualities never occur adjacent to
one another. Prepausally, long vowels are glottalized, becoming V’V. These processes are
discussed in §2.6.5.2 and §2.6.5.3.
As noted in §2.2.3, final short unstressed vowels are in the process of being lost in FM Totonac. I
analyze many lexical items as ending in a consonant with a voiceless latent vowel (i.e., lacking a
root node) in the release. In fact, all final oral stops release into latent vowel features, as do most
oral sonorants. These latent vowels can be distinguished from full vowels by their inability to
protect a final consonant from prepausal aspiration or glottalization (see §2.6.5.3 for a discussion
of the marking of prosodic boundaries with glottal features). Thus, there are minimal and near
minimal pairs that differ only in having a final latent vowel rather than a full vowel, such as
kúk h u" ‘uncle’ and kúku ‘white sand’; #túy’u" ‘type of plant’ and kúyu armadillo; luuw’! ‘snake’
and túwa ‘difficult’. In connected speech, root node epenthesis allows the full voicing of these
latent vowels, while prepausally they remain devoiced or are optionally deleted entirely. Vowel
epenthesis is covered in §2.6.5.1.
Variation in vowel quality is found in certain lexical items, both between speakers and within a
single speaker’s utterances. A striking example is the word for the pronoun ‘I’, which three of
my main consultants (all at least second generation natives of Filomeno Mata) pronounce with a
different initial vowel: ‘íkiti, ‘ákiti, ‘ékiti. While it does occur in non-final syllables, the variation
is especially common with final latent vowels, and in this context usually involves a~i or u~i.
This is probably due to the process of postlexical i epenthesis to separate consonants at a word
boundary (for details, see §2.6.5.1). If the historical quality of a final vowel is forgotten, this
epenthetic i may be reanalyzed as the underlying latent vowel. §2.4.6 provides some examples of
this variation.
2.4.1 /a/, /aa/. /a/ and /aa/ are low central vowels that can be plain or laryngealized. A stressed
short a is realized as mid-central Πwhen in a syllable closed by a non-glide consonant (see
§2.6.3.2 for low vowel centralization).
26) Examples of /a/ and /aa/
[la] ‘s/he lives’ [k%aa] ‘s/he cuts it’
[p%aas"awá] ‘happy’ [sáast h i&] ‘new’
[’aqs"áaq h a&] ‘head’ [c"aawilá’a&] ‘turkey’
[tlaawŒn] ‘s/he walks’ [sqalŒ#'] ‘intelligent’
[#kŒk h ] ‘s/he scratches it’ [wŒNqen] ‘frog’
[q%a’#n&i&] ‘blood’ [q%a#n&i&] ‘upon’
2.4.2 /i/, /ii/. The phonemes /i/ and /ii/ are high front vowels that can be plain or laryngealized.
Both have mid-vowel allophones adjacent to a uvular segment and optionally adjacent to a
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