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A phonological account of Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) tonal alternation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2019

HIROTO UCHIHARA Open the ORCID record for HIROTO UCHIHARA [Opens in a new window]  and
GREGORIO TIBURCIO CANO
HIROTO UCHIHARA*
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
GREGORIO TIBURCIO CANO*
Affiliation:
Secretaría de Educación de Guerrero
*
Authors’ address: Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Circuito Mario de la Cueva, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510, Ciudad de México, Mexicohirotouchihara81@gmail.com
Authors’ address: Calle Huehuetepec No. 14, Zilacayotitlán, municipio de Atlamajalcingo del Monte, estado de Guerrero, Mexico
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Abstract

Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) is known for its enigmatic tonal alternation in verb forms according to person and aspect-mode categories, in addition to suppletion and other segmental alternations. In this paper, we argue that the tonal alternations observed in Tlapanec regular agentive verbs can be straightforwardly accounted for by phonology, without resorting to any extreme abstractness: the lexical tones of the prefixes and the verb stems, with underspecification and floating tones, and cross-linguistically common tone processes such as tone spreading and floating tone docking. Such a phonological (or a morpheme-based) approach is contrasted with a word-based approach, where tonal alternations are viewed as inflectional classes. We show that the phonological approach is more adequate than a word-based approach.

Keywords

paradigm complexityphonologyTlapanectoneword-based morphology
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 807 - 863
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Shun Nakamoto, Kevin Cline, Néstor Hernández-Green and Carolyn O’meara for their valuable insights, and three anonymous referees of the Journal of Linguistics for their critical but constructive feedback, which significantly improved the paper. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Third Conference on the Sound Systems of Latino America at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in October 2018; we are grateful to the organizers and participants of the conference. This project was funded by the project PAPIIT-IN404019, ‘Complejidad paradigmática y tonal de las lenguas otomangues’, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The first author contributed the majority of the analysis, and the second author provided the data. Both authors worked together to check the data.

Glossing abbreviations follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules (http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php). The following is the list of abbreviations employed in this paper: 1, 2, 3 = first, second, third person; A, B, C = Class A, B, C; cmp = completive; ex = exclusive; H = high tone; in = inclusive; incmp = incompletive; L = low tone; M = mid tone; OCP = Obligatory Contour Principle; pl = plural; pot = potential; sg = singular; TAM = tense-aspect-mode; TBU = tone-bearing unit; X = any tone.

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