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Copyright by Susan Smythe Kung 2007 The Dissertation Committee for Susan Smythe Kung Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua Committee: Nora C. England, Supervisor Carlota S. Smith Megan Crowhurst Anthony C. Woodbury Paulette Levy James K. Watters A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua by Susan Smythe Kung, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2007 Dedication For the Tepehua people of Huehuetla, Hidalgo, Mexico, and especially for Nicolás. If it were not for their friendship and help, I never would have begun this dissertation. If it were not for their encouragement of me, as well as their commitment to my project, I never would have finished it. Acknowledgements My first and largest debt of gratitude goes to all of the speakers of Huehuetla Tepehua who contributed in some way to this grammar. Without them, this volume would not exist. I want to thank the Vigueras family, in particular, for taking me into their home and making me a part of their family: don Nicolás, his wife doña Fidela, their children Nico, Tonio, Mari, Carmelo, Martín, Lupe, and Laurencio, and their daughter-in-law Isela. Not only do I have a home here in the U.S., but I also have a home in Huehuetla with them. There was also the extended family, who lived in the same courtyard area and who also took me in and gave me free access to their homes and their lives: don Nicolás’ mother doña Angela, his two brothers don Laurencio and don Miguel, their wives doña Fidela and doña Juana, and all of their children. My deepest and most heart-felt thanks are for my husband, Jon, and our son, Shaun. Without their love, support, patience, and endless sacrifices, I never would have been able to finish this grammar. I also want to thank my mom and dad, who never failed to express their pride, and my father-in-law, a Ph.D. himself, who continually encouraged my progress. v I have so many additional people to thank that I’m going to thank them in chronological order, from the start of my graduate career. My fellow cohort members: Carrie Clarady, Lynda Olman Walsh, David Quinto-Pozos, and Kim Mellon Kight, for sharing both the good and the bad during the early years; I wouldn’t have made it to candidacy without their friendship. Heidi Johnson, for being a mentor to me every step of the way. Terry Kaufman and John Justeson, for hiring me to work on the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica; they are responsible for my decision to work on Huehuetla Tepehua and not on some other language. Mark Ferguson, for knowing the location of the appendix in the human body, for insisting that I see a doctor, and for, essentially, saving my life. Terry Kaufman (again), for teaching me how to do lexical field work the “right way” and Roberto Zavala, for teaching me to do it the fun way. Tony Woodbury, for serving as the principle investigator on my NSF Dissertation Improvement grant, and for providing invaluable advice and support while I was applying for fellowships. Thomas Smith Stark at the Colegio de México and Roberto Herrerra Herrerra, formerly of the Universidad de las Américas – Puebla, for serving as co-sponsors for my Fulbright-García Robles fellowship. Roberto Herrerra Herrerra (again) and Mandy Holzrichter, for easing my culture shock during my time in Cholula. Thom Smith Stark (again), his wife María, my fellow Fulbrighter Jennifer Jolly, and her husband Chris Gonzales, for providing me with two homes in Mexico City away from the field where I could go to decompress (and speak English!). Dottie Herzog, for sharing her unpublished Tepehua dictionary, as well as other unpublished data that she had vi compiled on the language, and also for sharing her workspace in Huehuetla while mine was being built. Mark Sicolli, for being there in Catemaco. Christina Willis and Lynda de Jong Boudreault, for being two of the best friends that I’ve had during this long gradual process, and for being my only two friends who could really, fully understood the journey. Suzanne Johnson, for showing me that there was more to life than just graduate school and linguistics (with or without the kids in tow). My fieldwork was funded by the following sources, and I thank them all: Fulbright IIE (Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship for scholars), the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant No. 0078453 with Anthony C. Woodbury, PI), the Pan American Round Tables of Texas (Melba Brunno Dawson Scholarship), and the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica. Most importantly, I want to thank my committee: Nora England, Carlota Smith, Megan Crowhurst, Tony Woodbury, Jim Watters, and Paulette Levy for all of their helpful comments, advice, encouragement, and words of praise (those kept me going more than anything!), not to mention their time, especially since this grammar turned out to be a lot longer than I had anticipated. My biggest thanks go to Nora, who has been the best supervisor and mentor that I could have hoped for! Most importantly, she insisted that this grammar be a thorough treatment of the language since it might be the only treatment that Huehuetla Tepehua will ever get. vii A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua Publication No._____________ Susan Smythe Kung, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2007 Supervisor: Nora C. England This dissertation is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua (HT), which is a member of the Totonacan language family. HT is spoken by fewer than 1500 people in and around the town of Huehuetla, Hidalgo, in the Eastern Sierra Madre mountains of the Central Gulf Coast region of Mexico. This grammar begins with an introduction to the language, its language family, and its setting, as well as a brief history of my contact with the language. The grammar continues with a description of the phonology of HT, followed by morphosyntactic and syntactic description of all of the major parts of speech, including verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and numbers; the grammar concludes with a description of the sentence-level syntax. A compilation of interlinearized texts appears in the appendix. HT is a polysynthetic, head-marking language with complex verbal morphology. Inflectional affixes include both prefixes and suffixes for which a viii templatic pattern is difficult to model. In addition to inflectional and derivational morphology, HT verbs are also host to a large number of aspectual derivational morphemes, each of which alters the meaning of the verb in a very specific way. Plural marking on both nouns and verbs for any third person argument is optional and determined by an animacy hierarchy, which is also used to determine verbal argument marking in various morphosyntactic constructions. HT nouns are completely unmarked for case, and certain nouns, including kinship terms and parts of a whole, are obligatorily possessed. The order of the major constituents is pragmatically determined, with a tendency towards VSO order in the absence of pragmatic or contextual clues and SVO order in context-rich textual examples. HT is an under-documented moribund language that is at imminent risk of extinction within the next two-to-three generations. Thus, this dissertation is a major contribution not only to the field of linguistics, but also to the Tepehua people who might one day be interested in the language of their grandparents. ix Table of Contents List of Tables........................................................................................................xix List of Figures ......................................................................................................xxi List of Illustrations ..............................................................................................xxii List of Abbrevations...........................................................................................xxiii Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 1.1 Introduction to the Language ................................................................... 1 1.2 My Research: The History, Setting, and Methodology........................... 8 1.3 Huehuetla Tepehua and the Totonacan Language family...................... 20 1.4 Review of the Literature........................................................................ 24 1.5 Overview of the Grammar...................................................................... 27 Chapter 2: Phonology............................................................................................ 30 2.1 Phonemic Inventory ............................................................................... 30 2.1.1 Consonants ................................................................................. 30 2.1.2 Vowels........................................................................................ 31 2.1.3 Practical Orthography ................................................................ 32 2.2 Phonemic Description ............................................................................ 36 2.2.1 Consonants ................................................................................. 36 2.2.1.1 Stops............................................................................... 36 2.2.1.2 Fricatives .......................................................................
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  • Duality of Patterning: Absolute Universal Or Statistical Tendency?

    Duality of Patterning: Absolute Universal Or Statistical Tendency?

    DOI 10.1515/langcog-2012-0016 Language and Cognition 2012; 4(4): 275 – 296 1 Juliette Blevins 2 3 Duality of patterning: Absolute universal or 4 statistical tendency? 5 6 Abstract: As more of the world’s languages are described and compared, more 7 absolute universals have joined the class of statistical tendencies. However, few 8 have questioned the universality of the duality of patterning. Following Hockett, 9 most linguists assume that in all human languages, discrete meaningless parts 10 combine to form meaningful units that, themselves, recombine. However, an 11 alternative interpretation, explored in this article, is that duality, like other 12 proposed linguistic universals, is a statistical tendency reflecting a complex set 13 of factors, and most centrally, the need for some minimal number of basic units 14 that can recombine to yield a potentially infinite set of form-meaning correspon- 15 dences. If this is the essence of duality, then we expect: languages where duality 16 is not a central component of grammar; languages where most, but not all, utter- 17 ances are decomposable into meaningless phonological units; and different types 18 of phonological building blocks in different languages. These expectations ap- 19 pear to be confirmed by natural language data. 20 21 Keywords: duality of patterning, language universals, statistical tendencies, pho- 22 nology, Charles F. Hockett 23 24 25 Juliette Blevins: Linguistics Program, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, 26 NY 10016, USA. E-mail: [email protected] 27 28 29 30 31 1 Linguistic universals as statistical tendencies 32 33 Absolute universals are properties that all languages share.