The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

epenthetic w appears before u in the compound skawawáwuun ‘dry wind’. No other exceptions
are found in my database.
2.5.5 Nasal restrictions. Nasals are restricted in their distribution within roots. Both nasal
phonemes n and m are found only preceding vowels, preceding homorganic plosives (see
consonant cluster discussion in §2.5.1 and §2.5.2) and word-finally. §2.6.1.1 covers the
synchronic constraints that limit the distribution of nasals within derived words.
2.5.6 Glottal stop restrictions. Glottal stops are found only in a limited range of environments,
a range much more restricted than many other Totonaco-Tepehua varieties. As epenthetic
segments, they appear preceding any vowel-initial prefix or root and prepausally separating the
moras of a long vowel (see §2.6.5.3 for the role of glottal stop in demarcating prosodic
boundaries). Morpheme-internally, they are extremely rare, occurring in only a handful of
forms: sa’in ‘rain’, c%a’áan ‘ant’, and the suffixes -qe’e MEANWHILE and -qo’o TOTALITIVE.
Unlike other stop phonemes, they cannot form clusters with fricatives or nasals. I speculate that
the glottal stop is being lost as a phoneme in FM Totonac, and is being relegated to a role
primarily as a marker of prosodic boundaries.
2.5.7 Root vs. affix structure. Roots, prefixes and suffixes differ only slightly in their phonemic
make-up and structure. Roots and suffixes are much more likely to be disyllabic than prefixes.
Only the special use causative maqa- and several of the body part prefixes (BPPs), such as laka-
‘face-related’ and maka- ‘hand-related’, have more than one syllable among the prefixes,
whereas many suffixes do, including ambulative –tii!a, 3 rd plural subject progressive –maana,
iterative –para, desiderative -kutun, totalitive -qo’o, MEANWHILE -qe’e, perfect aspect –niit!,
deictics –$it! and –$a’!, and 2SUB.pl –titi" (all described in Chapters 4 and 5).
Also, affixes are far less likely than roots to contain fricatives. Only past tense #- and several
BPPs ( e.g., ki!- ‘mouth-related’ and pi#- ‘neck-related’) among the prefixes, and the ambulative
–tii!a among suffixes, have fricatives. The negative and several negative polarity pro-clitics also
contain fricative segments: negative !aa=, NOT YET a!= and negative intensifier !aa=.
Fricatives are very common segments in roots.
2.6 Phonological processes. In this section, phonological processes that result in synchronic
alternations are discussed, first those targeting consonants, followed by those relating to vowels.
General phonological constraints that are active across all contexts are discussed first in each
section, then those constraints limited to particular morphological contexts are covered briefly.
Further discussion of morphologically conditioned phonology is found in Chapter 6. The final
subsection provides an analysis of postlexical prosodic constraints.
2.6.1 General constraints on consonants. Only two processes related to consonants are active
in all morphological contexts in FM Totonac, nasal deletion and lateral spirantization.
! #,!