DOCSLIB.ORG

The Phonology and Morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Phonology and Morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino Copyright by Stéphanie Villard 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Stéphanie Villard certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Phonology and Morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino Committee: Anthony C. Woodbury, Supervisor Nora C. England Patience L. Epps Danny Law Mark A. Sicoli The Phonology and Morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino by Stéphanie Villard, 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 2015 Acknowledgments When I ponder this endeavour which has absorbed the past eight years of my life, the one thought that keeps recurring is that I have been very fortunate to be able to spend so much time with a group of people who are the most hospitable, most generous, most fun to be around. I have received important help and support in various ways from many people. Some spent literally hundreds of hours working patiently with me through what must have sometimes felt like an agonizingly te- dious chore, while others cooked for us (my daughter and I), cared for us, offered us a comfortable place in their home, included us in their dailylife by inviting us to parties, dinners and more. I have always felt welcome, included, and cared for. This project involved so many people at various stages of the doc- umentation process that I cannot possibly name them all. Among those many people who have helped me in numerous ways, I particularly wish to acknowledge: Margarita González Hernández for being involved in this project from the get go. Year after year, she was present and available to work with me. I knew I could count on her. Over the years, we have spent many many hours together, working on multiple tasks related to the documentation project. iv She has shown a great deal of patience and dedication. She showed con- stant enthusiasm even in the difficult times when, for whatever reason, we would get frustrated at each other, or feel discouraged because we could not figure out one particular aspect of the grammar we would be working on. In those moments, we would take a break, eat a delicious mango or some other sweet local delicacy, enjoy a few minutes of sharing the local gossip, and then we would be ready to get back to work, refreshed. Another person who showed constant dedication to this project from the time he started is Anatolio Soriano Cortés. It was amazing to witness his dedication to learning to read and write in his native language. His level of reliability and commitment to his part and role within the project was invaluable. Julia González Hernández and Mago González Hernández (with her husband Pedro Franco) opened their houses to us, and really put into prac- tice the Spanish saying mi casa es tu casa. Both of them gave us a warm home to look forward to coming back to, and made us feel part of their family. I am also especially thankful to the following people for many rea- sons: Margarita González Hernández' husband, Toribio, Ana-Lilia González Hernández, Anel Franco, Judi Franco, Josefina Hernández, Isabel Cortés, Mari de Jésus Hernández, Matilde Hernández, Javier Ayuso and his wife Luci, and many more.... v I also want to thank my husband, Darien Ligarde, for his support all these years. He is by now probably the most linguistically savvy architect around, as he has painstakingly proof read most of my academic work. I am sure that it has not been easy for him to be away from Emma and I for such long periods of time, I know he must have secretly worried a lot about me travelling with our infant daughter, and travelling to such a remote place. But he has always shown support for my work and I can't thank him enough for that. I want to thank my daughter Emma Ligarde for being such a won- derful travel companion. She came along with me to Zacatepec for the first time when she was 7 months old and has spent a lot of time there since then. I know that it was hard for her to have to be separated from her dad for long periods of time, so often in the year. I am so grateful for her amaz- ing adaptation abilities and her constant good spirits in times when she was constantly shlepped around along with me or left behind in the village with a friend care giver. I hope she remembers those times fondly. I could not have achieved any of this if I had left her behind in the US. I wish to thank my supervisor, Tony Woodbury for his constant sup- port all these years, for reading and re-reading many drafts and revisions of this particular work, but also many other written pieces, including presen- tations, articles, grant proposals etc. His comments and suggestions have always been a tremendous help, and contributed to greatly improving my work. vi I also wish to thank the administration and staff of the University of Texas at Austin, and more specifically Ben Rapstine and Leslie Crooks for their help navigating all the bureaucracy related to the administrative part of my project. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank Richard Meier who was the Chair of the Linguistics Department for many years dur- ing my years of graduate school. He was a tremendous Chair who really showed interest in every single student in the department. I always felt I could turn to him for advice with any concerns related to department life. Thanks to the other members of my committee: Nora England, Pa- tience Epps, Danny Law and Mark Sicoli for all the feedback and comments on this dissertation. Many thanks to my colleagues and dear friends Gabriela Salido and Emilie Destruel who have made these years in graduate school so special and fun. Thanks also to Leah Velleman (and Ryan Sullivant) who acted as my own private LaTeX consultants. It was such a relief knowing that I could ask them about technical issues instead of having to agonize through all the possible solutions posted on nerdy blogs. Thanks to my colleagues and friends from the Chatino Language Doc- umentation Project: Ryan Sullivant, Adam Hammick, Justin McIntosh, Eric Campbell, Emiliana Cruz, Hilaria Cruz, Lynn Hou, and Kate Mesh. All to- gether, we shared data, references, advice, fieldwork and much more. My research has been supported in part by two grants from the En- dangered Language Documentation Programme at the Hans Rausing Endan- vii gered Languages Programme at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of London (MDP0153, IGS0102), as well as some fellowships and small grants from the University of Texas at Austin. viii The Phonology and Morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino Publication No. Stéphanie Villard, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Anthony C. Woodbury This dissertation presents an analysis of the phonology and some as- pects of the morphology of Zacatepec Eastern Chatino (ISO 639-3: ctz), an Otomanguean language of the Zapotecan branch spoken near the Pacific coast of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is based on primary data obtained from fieldwork conducted by the author (from 2006 to 2013) in the community of San Marcos Zacatepec, district of Juquila, Oaxaca, Mexico. Zacatepec Chatino is only spoken in that small community of about one thousand inhabitants. There are only about 300 speakers left, all above 50 years old. This variety of Chatino finds itself in an advanced language shift to Spanish, and as a result its vitality status is considered severely endangered. ix The description of Zacatepec Chatino is important within the study of Chatino languages in general, as contrary to most other Chatino vari- eties, it conserves all non-final syllables of its roots. This fact makes ita centerpiece for the Chatino language puzzle as its transparent morphology tells the story of the evolution of more innovative Chatino varieties. Indeed, beyond simply revealing lost segments/morphemes, it provides polymoraic structures that host clear sequences of tones that are not discernable in the monosyllabic/monomoraic varieties. The phonological analysis begins with a presentation of the segmen- tal sound system, including two of the three contrastive supra-segmental features: nasalization and vowel length. Nasal vowels and long vowels are described together with oral vowels whereas tone, is dealt with in detail in a separate chapter. Directly following the segmental analysis, a chapter is devoted to the phonotactics of the language. Tone, being the hallmark of Otomanguean languages, is an area of the phonology that is described in great detail. The tonal system is intricate as it involves four levels of pitch represented in five mora-linked tones and three unlinked (floating) tones arranged in many tonal sequences which be- come the signatures for lexical classes. Furthermore, polysyllabicity allows for many moraic shapes resulting in a variety of possible phonetic realiza- tions of the tonal sequences which mark the tonal Classes. The other highlight of this dissertation is a chapter dedicated to the description of the inflectional system, an area revealed to be quite com- x plex at the morphological and the morphophonological level. Nevertheless, despite its prima facie maze of irregularities, this intricate inflectional sys- tem actually presents a high rate of predictability in its segmental (aspect prefixes) and tonal conjugation Classes. This chapter describes the differ- ent patterns of inflection (segmental and tonal) for three different partsof speech: the verb, the inalienable noun, and the predicative adjective.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Story and Methods of the Chatino Language Documentation Project
    Vol. 8 (2014), pp. 490-524 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/ http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24615 Finding a way into a family of tone languages: The story and methods of the Chatino Language Documentation Project Emiliana Cruz University of Massachusetts at Amherst Anthony C. Woodbury University of Texas at Austin We give a narrative description of our ten-year path into the elaborate tonal systems of the Chatino languages (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico), and of some of the methods we have used and recommend, illustrated with specific examples. The work, ongoing at the time of writing, began when one of us (Cruz), a native speaker of San Juan Quiahije Chatino, entered the University of Texas at Austin as a Ph.D. student and formed, together with the other of us (Woodbury), a professor there, the Chatino Language Documentation Project, ultimately incorporating five other Ph.D. students and two other senior researchers. We argue for the importance of an interplay among speaker and non-speaker perspectives over the long course of work; a mix of introspection, hypothesis-testing, natural speech record- ing, transcription, translation, grammatical analysis, and dictionary-making as research methods and activities; an emphasis on community training as an active research context; the simultaneous study of many varieties within a close-knit language family to leverage progress; and the use of historical-comparative methods to get to know tonal systems and the roles they play at a deeper level. 0. PREAMBLE. Emiliana: My first language was Chatino. I started primary school when I was six years old. At that time, I did not speak Spanish.
    [Show full text]
  • The Separate Life Cycles of Prefix Classes Vs Tone Ablaut Classes in Aspect/Mood Inflection in the Chatino Languages of Oaxaca
    AMERINDIA 41: 75-120, 2019 Conjugational double-classification: The separate life cycles of prefix classes vs tone ablaut classes in aspect/mood inflection in the Chatino languages of Oaxaca Anthony C. WOODBURY University of Texas at Austin Abstract: In the Chatino languages (Oto-Manguean; Oaxaca), verbs show two independent patterns of conjugational classification in marking aspect and mood, one based on prefixation and the other based on tonal ablaut. I term this conjugational double-classification. Each pattern determines its own conjugational classification of verb stems: verbs fall into several aspect/mood prefix conjugation classes that depend partly on their segmental structure and transitivity; and they simultaneously fall into several largely orthogonal tone-ablaut conjugation classes that depend partly on the tonal characteristics of the stem. A Chatino child therefore must learn both the prefix conjugation class and the tone-ablaut conjugation class of every verb s/he learns. Furthermore, it is shown that diachronically, the prefix classes and the tone-ablaut classes have had independent life cycles: in San Marcos Zacatepec Eastern Chatino, both systems are largely intact; in Zenzontepec Chatino, the prefixation classes are intact but the tone ablaut classes have eroded through tonal simplification; and in San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, the prefixation classes have eroded through initial syllable loss while the tone ablaut classes are intact. It is suggested that autosegmental phonology and morphology, when placed in diachronic
    [Show full text]
  • COMPARING HUMANS and BIRDS by Daniel C. Mann a Dissertation
    STABILIZING FORCES IN ACOUSTIC CULTURAL EVOLUTION: COMPARING HUMANS AND BIRDS by Daniel C. Mann A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 2019 DANIEL C. MANN All rights reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Linguistics in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. JULIETTE BLEVINS Date Chair of the Examining Committee GITA MARTOHARDJONO Date Executive Officer MARISA HOESCHELE DAVID C. LAHTI MICHAEL I. MANDEL Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract STABILIZING FORCES IN ACOUSTIC CULTURAL EVOLUTION: COMPARING HUMANS AND BIRDS By Daniel C. Mann Advisor: Professor Juliette Blevins Learned acoustic communication systems, like birdsong and spoken human language, can be described from two seemingly contradictory perspectives. On one hand, learned acoustic communication systems can be remarkably consistent. Substantive and descriptive generalizations can be made which hold for a majority of populations within a species. On the other hand, learned acoustic communication systems are often highly variable. The degree of variation is often so great that few, if any, substantive generalizations hold for all populations in a species. Within my dissertation, I explore the interplay of variation and uniformity in three vocal learning species: budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus), house finches (Haemorhous mexicanus), and humans (Homo sapiens). Budgerigars are well-known for their versatile mimicry skills, house finch song organization is uniform across populations, and human language has been described as the prime example of variability by some while others see only subtle variations of largely uniform system.
    [Show full text]
  • Proposal for Superscript Diacritics for Prenasalization, Preglottalization, and Preaspiration
    1 Proposal for superscript diacritics for prenasalization, preglottalization, and preaspiration Patricia Keating Department of Linguistics, UCLA [email protected] Daniel Wymark Department of Linguistics, UCLA [email protected] Ryan Sharif Department of Linguistics, UCLA [email protected] ABSTRACT The IPA currently does not specify how to represent prenasalization, preglottalization, or preaspiration. We first review some current transcription practices, and phonetic and phonological literature bearing on the unitary status of prenasalized, preglottalized and preaspirated segments. We then propose that the IPA adopt superscript diacritics placed before a base symbol for these three phenomena. We also suggest how the current IPA Diacritics chart can be modified to allow these diacritics to be fit within the chart. 2 1 Introduction The IPA provides a variety of diacritics which can be added to base symbols in various positions: above ([a͂ ]), below ([n̥ ]), through ([ɫ]), superscript after ([tʰ]), or centered after ([a˞]). Currently, IPA diacritics which modify base symbols are never shown preceding them; the only diacritics which precede are the stress marks, i.e. primary ([ˈ]) and secondary ([ˌ]) stress. Yet, in practice, superscript diacritics are often used preceding base symbols; specifically, they are often used to notate prenasalization, preglottalization and preaspiration. These terms are very common in phonetics and phonology, each having thousands of Google hits. However, none of these phonetic phenomena is included on the IPA chart or mentioned in Part I of the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (IPA 1999), and thus there is currently no guidance given to users about transcribing them. In this note we review these phenomena, and propose that the Association’s alphabet include superscript diacritics preceding the base symbol for prenasalization, preglottalization and preaspiration, in accord with one common way of transcribing them.
    [Show full text]
  • LCSH Section Z
    Z (Computer program language) Zaan River Valley (Netherlands) Zabiello family (Not Subd Geog) [QA76.73.Z2] UF Zaan Valley (Netherlands) Here are entered works on families with the BT Programming languages (Electronic BT Valleys—Netherlands surnames Zabiello and Zabiełło. computers) Zaan Valley (Netherlands) When this heading is assigned to works on an individual family, the appropriate diacritical marks, if Z-49 (Video display terminal) USE Zaan River Valley (Netherlands) any, are included in the heading in the catalog record. USE Zenith Z-49 (Video display terminal) Zaar (African people) (May Subd Geog) UF Zabello family Z-80 (Microprocessor) [DT515.45.Z33] Zabirmawa (African people) USE Zilog Z-80 (Microprocessor) UF Gus (African people) USE Zarma (African people) Z-100 (Computer) Guus (African people) Zabirmawa language USE Zenith Z-100 (Computer) Saya (African people) USE Zarma language Z bosons Sayanci (African people) Zablan family (Not Subd Geog) [QC793.5.B62-QC793.5.B629] Sayara (African people) UF Sablan family UF Z particles Sayawa (African people) Zable family Z physics Seiyara (African people) USE Zabel family BT Bosons Seiyawa (African people) Zabludowski family (Not Subd Geog) Z Canyon (Wash.) Seya (African people) Zabon BT Canyons—Washington (State) Seyawa (African people) USE Pummelo Z-crank engines Sigdi (African people) Zaborski Park Krajobrazowy (Poland) USE Barrel engines Sigidi (African people) BT Parks—Poland Z-DNA Vigzar (African people) Zabrops (May Subd Geog) [QP624.5.Z33] Vikzar (African people) [QL537.A85] UF
    [Show full text]
  • UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The inventory and distribution of tone in Tù’un Ndá’vi, the Mixtec of Piedra Azul (San Martín Peras), Oaxaca Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9fz844hn Author Peters, Simon L Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara The Inventory and Distribution of Tone in Tù’un Ndá’vi, the Mixtec of Piedra Azul (San Martín Peras), Oaxaca A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Linguistics by Simon L. Peters Committee in charge: Professor Eric W. Campbell, Chair Professor Matthew Gordon Professor Argyro Katsika December 2018 The thesis of Simon L. Peters is approved. ____________________________________________ Matthew Gordon ____________________________________________ Argyro Katsika ____________________________________________ Eric W. Campbell, Committee Chair December 2018 The Inventory and Distribution of Tone in Tù’un Ndá’vi, the Mixtec of Piedra Azul (San Martín Peras), Oaxaca Copyright © 2018 by Simon L. Peters iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Above all, I would like to thank Gabriel Mendoza not only for sharing his language with me, but also for his friendship and patience over the past several years as we have worked together to study and document his language. Certainly this thesis would not exist if it were not for the support of Eric W. Campbell, and I am extremely grateful for his advising. I would also like to thank my committee members Matthew Gordon and Argyro Katsika for their comments and feedback on this project. I am also incredibly appreciative of all the individuals who participate in the MICOP-UCSB Tu’un Nda’vi/Savi workshops and other linguistic projects, who have been a great community and source of encouragement throughout my time in graduate school.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright by Justin Daniel Mcintosh 2011
    Copyright by Justin Daniel McIntosh 2011 The report committee for Justin Daniel McIntosh certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Grammatical Sketch of Teotepec Chatino APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Anthony C. Woodbury Nora C. England Grammatical Sketch of Teotepec Chatino by Justin Daniel McIntosh, B.A. Report 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 Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2011 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the community of jyche˛r 7ya34(+0) j7o31 - Santa Luc´ıaTeotepec for their support and collaboration in the process of documenting their language. Since 2007 I have had the opportunity to know, work with and live among the people of this community. Particularly, I thank the family Quintas Salinas as they have made me feel at home during my long stays in their town. I want to thank Reginaldo Quintas Figueroa for his active and enthusiastic collaboration during many hours of elicitation. I appreciate our trekking through the mountains to conduct interviews with elders. We have both learned much from one another as we discovered many things about his language. I would like to thank my advisors Anthony Woodbury and Nora England for their support and feedback on my work. I am grateful for the support of my colleagues of the Chatino Language Documentation Project (CLDP) of the University of Texas at Austin - Emiliana Cruz, Hilaria Cruz, St´ephanieVillard, Eric Campbell and Ryan Sullivant. Indeed, the previous work on tone conducted by Tony Woodbury, Emiliana Cruz and Hilaria Cruz has facilitated the tone analysis in this paper.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright by Justin Daniel Mcintosh 2015
    Copyright by Justin Daniel McIntosh 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Justin Daniel McIntosh certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Aspects of Phonology and Morphology of Teotepec Eastern Chatino Committee: Anthony C. Woodbury, Supervisor Nora C. England, Co-Supervisor Patience L. Epps Stephen M. Wechsler Je↵rey W. Rasch Daniel Suslak Aspects of Phonology and Morphology of Teotepec Eastern Chatino by Justin Daniel McIntosh, 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 2015 To my mother and father Sue and Mike McIntosh “Los Chatinos de mi edad tenemos una gran responsabilidad con nuestra gente, pues puede decirse que somos la generaci´ondel cambio, la que tiene que encargar los cambios. Nuestros padres fueron, en general, la ´ultima generaci´onque no asisti´oa la escuela y nue- stros hijos son la primera generaci´onque saldr´amasivamente escolarizada. La escuela es el principal lugar donde se ense˜na que nuestras verdades son falsas, y nuestros conocimientos son rid´ıculos ante la “ciencia”, y los ni˜nos que aprenden esto, abandonan y menosprecian nuestros rituales, comportamientos y sabidur´ıa, que ahora conciben como irracionales, su- persticiosos, absurdos, falsos. La verdad es ahora la verdad occidental, ya no la verdad Chatina, aunque esta verdad nuestra nos haya permitido vivir durante siglos.” Tom´asCruz Lorenzo San Juan Quiahije Medio Milenio, 1989 † ⇠ Acknowledgments The work involved in the production of this dissertation would not have been possible without the support and engagement of many people.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright by Hilaria Cruz 2014
    Copyright by Hilaria Cruz 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Hilaria Cruz Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: LINGUISTIC POETICS AND RHETORIC OF EASTERN CHATINO OF SAN JUAN QUIAHIJE Committee: Anthony C Woodbury, Supervisor Nora C England, Co-Supervisor Joel Sherzer Patience L Epps Jeffrey Rasch Anthony K Webster LINGUISTIC POETICS AND RHETORIC OF EASTERN CHATINO OF SAN JUAN QUIAHIJE by Hilaria Cruz, 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 2014 Dedication To my parents Tomás Cruz Lorenzo and Isabel Cruz Baltazar, my daughter Shalui Tsyvya Klara Abeles, and niece Frida Cruz. Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the time, talent, and support of talented San Juan Quiahije speakers, advisors, friends, esteemed colleagues, and family. I'd like to modify the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child". It took the two communities of San Juan Quiahije and Cieneguilla to raise this dissertation. For most linguists the people in their area of research become friends and even family. For me, the inverse is true. I was born in Cieneguilla, and the people in these communities were in fact my friends and family well before I commenced this endeavor to become a linguist and help document and revitalize the Chatino language. My love, respect, and gratitude to my people remains constant. The process to reveal the importance of SJQ Chatino verbal art in this work took the better part of a decade of study at the University of Texas at Austin.
    [Show full text]
  • 154 Personal Pronouns in Zapotec and Zapotecan1
    PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN ZAPOTEC AND ZAPOTECAN1 Natalie Operstein University of California, Los Angeles This paper is a comparative and historical study of personal pronouns in Zapotec and Zapotecan. It is based on data from more than 20 Zapotec languages and several dialects of Chatino. On the basis of this study, a number of dialectal isoglosses involv- ing personal pronouns are identified and full reconstructions of the Proto-Zapotec and Proto-Zapotecan systems of personal pronouns are attempted. [Keywords: Zapotec, Chatino, Zapotecan, Otomanguean, personal pronouns] 1. Introduction. 1.1. Zapotec and Zapotecan. The Zapotec family of languages is spo- ken mainly in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. Together with Chatino it con- stitutes the Zapotecan branch of the Otomanguean stock. The exact number of different languages within Zapotec has not been determined with cer- tainty. Based on structural criteria, Kaufman (n.d.:1, 13) recognizes 5 to 10 different languages within Zapotec, while the Ethnologue (Grimes et al. 2002), based on mutual intelligibility testing, identifies 57. Zapotec is di- vided into the following dialectal zones: Solteco and Papabuco (spoken in Sola de Vega), Central (comprising the Zapotec languages of the Oaxaca Valley and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec), Northern and Southern (spoken to the north and south of the Oaxaca Valley, respectively) (on the classification of Zapotec, see Angulo 1926, Angulo and Freeland 1935, Kaufman, n.d., and Suárez 1990 and the bibliography cited therein).2 1 I would like to thank Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson for the opportunity to work on the Zapotec of Santa María Zaniza during the summers of 1999 and 2000 as part of their Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica.
    [Show full text]
  • Verb Classes in Juchitán Zapotec GABRIELA PÉREZ BÁEZ
    Verb Classes in Juchitán Zapotec GABRIELA PÉREZ BÁEZ Smithsonian Institution TERRENCE KAUFMAN University of Pittsburgh Abstract. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of verb classes in Juchitán Zapotec, an Otomanguean language belonging to the Zapotec branch of Zapotecan, following the four-class system of verbal classification laid out in earlier work by Terrence Kaufman. Our analysis, based on a thorough review of over two thousand Juchitán Zapotec verbs, confirms the applicability of the four-class system to Juchitán Zapotec data, improving over previous analyses of verbal morphology in the language and adding to the evidence that this system can be applied throughout the Zapotecan family (including Chatino); further, our study stresses the relevance of data-driven rather than theory-driven lin- guistic analyses. 1. Introduction. The motivations for undertaking this study are manifold. At the descriptive level, our intention is to make widely available for the first time a comprehensive analysis of Juchitán Zapotec verb classes. The phonology of this language is conservative; both the consonantal and the vocalic segments of the inflectional allomorphs have been well preserved and are unequivocally identifiable across paradigms. The extensive data presented here thus con- stitutes a valuable resource against which to compare verbal classification in other Zapotec and Chatino languages–for example, Campbell’s (2011) study of verb classification in Zenzontepec Chatino. Our analysis offers a clear and simple system of verbal classification–an improvement, we argue, over the ear- lier attempts at understanding Juchitán Zapotec verb morphology by Marlett and Pickett (1987) and Pickett (1953, 1955)–which, more importantly, applies throughout both the Zapotec and the Chatino language groups.
    [Show full text]
  • Prosodic Structure in Ixtayutla Mixtec: Evidence for the Foot
    Prosodic structure in Ixtayutla Mixtec: Evidence for the foot by Kevin L. Penner A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics University of Alberta Examining committee: Dr. David Beck, Supervisor Dr. Anja Arnhold, Supervisory Committee Dr. Christian DiCanio, Supervisory Committee Dr. Stephanie Archer, Examiner Dr. Larry Hyman, External Examiner © Kevin L. Penner, 2019 Abstract Research on Mixtec languages (Otomanguean, Mexico), has long recognized a bimoraic/ bisyllabic “couplet” as an essential structure for the description of the phonology and morphology (e.g. Pike 1948; Josserand 1983); however, what exactly this structure is in terms of the struc- ture of the word, as well as the nature and extent of its influence in the grammar has not been adequately addressed. Most researchers have assumed that the couplet is the root, but this is prob- lematic since some synchronic roots are larger than a couplet, other couplets are multimorphemic and some couplets have a reduced form when not the stressed element in compounds. For a more adequate understanding of this structure, I turn to prosodic phonology where units of higher level phonological organization arranged in what is called the prosodic hierarchy form the domains for phonological patterns and provide the shapes of templates. Of particular relevance to the problem at hand is the foot, which is identified in the literature as a constituent between the syllable and the prosodic word in the prosodic hierarchy (Selkirk 1980a; Selkirk 1980b). Cross-linguistically, the foot is integrally connected to stress assignment, has a small inventory of basic shapes, plays an important templatic function in the synchronic and diachronic phonology of many languages and provides the domain for phonological rules and phonotactic generalizations.
    [Show full text]