From the seminal work by Aronoff (1994), the study of inflectional classes has become of interest in morphological theory. Most of our current knowledge of verb inflectional classes, also known as "conjugation classes", remains circumscribed to European languages. On the other hand, the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico have recently awoken interest because of their puzzling internal diversity and morphological abundance, but much of their morphological complexities remain poorly understood because of the lack of comprehensive materials. To increase our understanding of such classes, in this article I present an analysis of the three conjugation classes of Tilapa Otomi, an Otomian language close to extinction which belongs to the Oto-Pamean branch of Oto-Manguean. In the article, I also provide an example of how the canonicity of conjugation classes can be ranked following the approach advocated by Corbett (2009). The results of such an evaluation show that while two of the three classes of Tilapa Otomi are canonical to a certain extent, a third one is a very poor example of an inflectional class for the purposes of typological comparison.

We examine the extent to which practices of language use may be diffused through language contact and areally shared, using data on spatial reference frame use by speakers of eight indigenous languages from in and around the Mesoamerican linguistic area and three varieties of Spanish. Regression models show that the frequency of L2-Spanish use by speakers of the indigenous languages predicts the use of relative reference frames in the L1 even when literacy and education levels are accounted for. A significant difference in frame use between the Mesoamerican and non-Mesoamerican indigenous languages further supports the contact diffusion analysis.

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The tonal inflection of verbs of the Amuzgo language of San Pedro Amuzgos (Oto-Manguean, Mexico) displays a great degree of allomorphy. When faced with allomorphy of this sort, the inflectional class model often reveals an internal logic in a system, but in the case of Amuzgo organizing the inflection into tonal classes results instead in a system which is seemingly chaotic, and somewhat impractical for descriptive purposes. In order to make sense of the apparent chaos, in this paper I pursue an alternative view of the data based on characterizing verbs firstly according to their paradigmatic structure with regard to tonal inflection and then characterizing tonal exponents by way of default and implicative rules of exponence which allow us to comprehend the core of this inflectional system. Having identified this core, I then show how verbs relate to each other on a continuum of morphological complexity. Table of contents The problemIn the verbal inflection of SP-Amuzgo, tone alterations on the last syllable of a verbal stem express person/number of the subject. But the type of inflectional system that these tonal alterations engender is very intricate. Two situations are responsible for the intricacy. The first is that there is a great degree of tonal allomorphy for the encoding of person/number values. The other is that there are no dedicated tones that may serve as clear exponents for those values. To illustrate this, consider the final-syllable tones in the 1SG and 2SG imperfect forms of the verbs in Table 1 (data from Feist et al. 2015). 1 For convenience, the relevant tones are given in the last two columns. 2 1SG2SG 1SG 2SG a. to 3 -ndɛ 1 to 3 -ndɛʔ 53 'chew' 1 53 b. to 3 -miʔ 1 kiʔ 1 tyɛ 1 to 3 -miʔ 1 ki 1 tye ʔ 1 'sit down' 1 1 c. to 3 -ndi 5 ʔhndɔ 3 to 3 -ndi 5 ʔhnduʔ 3 'be corpulent' 3 3 d. to 3 -tzi 5 ʔma 12 to 3 -tzi 5 ʔmaʔ 1 'show' 12 1 e. to 3 -tiu 51 u 3 to 3 -tiuʔ 1 'whistle' 51 1 f. to 3 -tzia 51 a 3 to 3 -tziaʔ 51 'build' 51 51 g. to 3 -baʔ 1 ba 53 to 3 -ba 3 baʔ 1 'go up' 53 1 h. to 3 -baʔ 1 nɔ 53 to 3 -ba 3 noʔ 12 'walk a bit further' 53 12 i. to 3 -ma 53 to 3 -maʔ 53 'wash' 53 53

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