El zapoteco de Teotitlán del Valle ha recibido mucha atención, probablemente, debido a la hipótesis de que es el heredero directo del zapoteco colonial. No obstante, su sistema tonal en gran medida se ha quedado inexplorado por parte de los lingüistas y estudiosos del zapoteco. El objetivo de este artículo es doble. Primero, presentar un texto oral sobre Dā Krésěːnsy ‘Don Crescencio’. Segundo, a partir de los datos de este texto oral, caracterizar el sistema y los procesos tonales en el zapoteco de Teotitlán del Valle. Hasta donde sabemos, este es el primer intento de identificación y representación de todos los contrastes fonológicos y tonos en esta lengua zapoteca.

Tone and phonation type are known to show complex interactions. I argue that breathy vowels in one Central Zapotec variety, San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (Otomanguean, Mexico), has resulted from an original tonal contrast between the low and rising tones (registrogenesis), based both on language-internal and comparative evidence with other closely-related Central Zapotec varieties. The case of Central Zapotec is unusual in that the direction of the sound change is from a tonal contrast to a phonation contrast, while in other known cases the direction is usually the opposite.

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.

Glides in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (Otomanguean) are underlyingly moraic and behave as other fortis consonants. Further, this Zapotec variety presents a clear case of [-consonantal] high vowels and [+consonantal] glides, exhibiting different patterns of behavior. This requires us to consider vowels and glides as separate entities in the underlying representation, rather than establishing a distinction between them based on differences in moraicity.

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