The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

’aqoNqs" ‘he braids it’ "qooNq" ‘sound of snoring’
lakas%úmp'i& ‘aggressive-looking’ kc%imps" ‘I blink’
’aqc%íinc" ‘mare’ paq"c%a& ‘tomato’
wayáamp’i& ‘you ate over there’ kac%iwíinant’i& ‘speak!’
mis%kiniitánts' ‘he already gave it to you’
2.5.3 Root harmony constraints. Roots in FM Totonac are governed by three constraints on the
co-occurrence of consonants, one of which, uvular harmony, continues to be active within certain
morphological contexts (see §2.6.2.1). Uvular harmony requires that dorsal stops within a root
be underlyingly either all [+back] or all [-back], thus /k/ and /q/ never co-occur within a root,
e.g., qooq h o& ‘mute’ and "wakák’a& ‘liver’.
Fricative harmony disallows coronal fricatives of more than one place/manner within a root, that
is /s/, /s"/, and /#/ cannot co-occur within a morpheme. This generalization is not always surface
true because of the spirantization of syllable-final l (see §2.6.1.2). The fricative harmony process
is generally not synchronically active in FM Totonac, unlike in other varieties of Totonac, such
as Misantla (McKay 1999:36). (However, see §2.6.2.2.2.3 for a *s%-s" constraint that causes
dissimilation of adjacent alveopalatal fricatives across a morpheme boundary.) Examples of
words with internal fricative harmony are séqsi ‘sweet’ and s%éqs%i ‘salty-sweet’.
Similarly, affricate harmony prevents more than one of the (coronal) affricates--ts, c%, tl-- within a
single morpheme (tsiitsi" ‘rash’, $e$ ‘pitahaya fruit’), but no synchronic constraints enforce this
harmony in larger domains.
Since affricates may be analyzed as having a sequence of +continuant/-continuant features
(Sagey 1986), affricate harmony may be seen as simply the response of the fricative portion of
the segments to the fricative harmony constraint. If this were the case, we would expect
fricatives to combine only with affricates with a matching release. This is generally true;
however four exceptional morphemes in the non-ideophonic lexicon (shown below) and several
ideophones contain a fricative and an affricate with a different fricative release:
35) Examples of non-harmonic words
c%eq" ‘puddle’ c%utóq" ‘s/he pulls it off’
paq"c%a& ‘tomato’ ta"ts’ ‘seed’
2.5.4 Approximant restrictions. The three approximants—l, y, and w—cannot precede
segments that are featurally too similar to them. This means that l cannot precede the lateral
fricative (nor follow it), y cannot precede i, and w cannot precede u within a word. There are two
exceptions to the *yi constraint: sayín ‘rain’ which is historically sa’in, and #kayíw’! ‘green’. An
! #+!