The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

2.7.2.3 Sound symbolic adverbial stress. Reduplicated sound symbolic adverbs (see §2.8 and
§5.5.6) express sound or manner of motion and precede the verb. They always take emphatic
primary stress on each of the reduplicants.
200) /pim pim min c"uc"uti&/
hop hop come water
[pím pím mín c"úc"uti&]
‘the rain comes bouncing down’
201) /qolo qolo ta-an-li& c"iwis"/
roll roll 3SUB.pl-go-PFTV
[qólo qólo ta‘á# c"íwis]
‘the stones went rolling down’
202) /c"imps" c"imps" laka-wan/
blink blink FACE-say
[c"ímps" c"ímps" lakawán]
‘he blinks his eyes'
2.7.3 Interrogative stress shift. A cross-linguistically unusual pattern of stress shift (as well as a
special intonational pattern) marks interrogative utterances Filomeno Mata Totonac. Stress is
morphologically or lexically determined in the language, but in interrogative utterances, the
stress on one or more words shifts one or more syllables to the right or left, as in $íi liilaka#tláwa
‘how he fixed it’ vs. $íi liilaká#tlawa ‘how did he fix it?’. The process is optional but very
frequent, and affects both polarity and content questions. The syntactic constituent most often
affected is the verb, and the most common shift is one syllable to the left, although great
variation is found. Stress may shift on subject, object, determiner, adjective or other element as
well as, or instead of, on the verb. This is especially interesting since often the only difference
between a verb in the imperfective aspect and one in the perfective is the stress pattern, with
perfective stress one syllable to the left.
The details of this process, particularly the interaction between stress and intonation, must be left
for further study. At this time I can only offer a statistical summary of the findings. In my
database of 200 questions (90 content, 110 yes/no), 81% show stress shift on at least one
element. The most likely shifts are: one syllable to the left in 57% of the cases, two syllables to
the left in 20% of the questions, and one syllable to the right in 15% of cases. The elements most
! ),!