The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

Chapter 3 Non-verbal morphology
3.1 Introduction. This chapter covers the morphology of the major non-verbal word classes in
Filomeno Mata Totonac: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and numerals. Although far
simpler than the verbal morphology, as will be seen, the morphological processes associated with
some of these classes, namely nouns and adjectives, are quite extensive, and include inflection,
derivation, cliticization and compounding. Each of the other word classes undergoes a very
limited number of morphological processes: pluralization in the case of pronouns, derivation
with classifiers in the case of numerals. In addition, all word classes may take the
negative/negative polarity proclitics and aspectual enclitics; this is the only type of
morphological process associated with adverbs. Almost all morphology related to non-verbal
elements is concatenative, achieved, as in verbs, through both prefixation and suffixation. The
exception is reduplication in certain subsets of the lexicon, where it appears to be mainly a
diachronic process. Some adjectives are subject to partial reduplication; the sound and manner of
motion adverbs are fully reduplicated forms; and a handful of nouns are fully reduplicated to
form time expressions.
In a number of Totonac languages (see MacKay 1999 for Misantla Totonac; McQuown 1990 for
Coatepec Totonac) nouns and adjectives are placed together in a single word class of nominals,
but this is not justified for FM Totonac (also see Beck (2000) for Upper Necaxa Totonac). In the
variety studied here, both nouns and adjectives may be pluralized (§3.3.1), may undergo
derivation with Body Part prefixes (BPP) (§3.3.4), and may take certain clitics (§3.3.9).
However, the morphological patterning of the nouns and adjectives is distinct in many other
ways, with nouns undergoing many additional inflectional and derivational processes which are
detailed in this chapter.
Since nouns are subject to the greatest amount of morphology, this chapter is structured around
them. The morphological processes related to nouns only, or to both nouns and other word
classes, are discussed in §3.3; strictly adjectival morphology follows in §3.4, adverbial
morphology in §3.5, and §3.6 ends the chapter with a description of the large number of numeral
classifiers. First, I will briefly address derivation and stress, and in §3.2 provide an outline of
pronouns and demonstratives. Appendix A contains a list of all affixes and clitics discussed in
this chapter.
3.1.1 Non-verbal derivation. In my database of 1500 nouns, adjectives and adverbs,
approximately 15% are monomorphemic. The great majority has undergone some morphological
construction, and most are derived from verbs.
3.1.2 Stress. Non-verbal monomorphemes have lexical stress. Stress in all derived words is
determined by the final suffix construction. Stress in FM Totonac always falls within a threesyllable
window at the right edge of word. While monomorphemic words show only final or
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