The conjugation classes of Tilapa Otomi: An approach from canonical typology

Abstract

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.

Morphosyntactic complexity: A typology of lexical splits

“…Work on other areas of syntax includes Nikolaeva &Spencer 2008 andVan de Velde 2013. Work in inflectional morphology is presented in Corbett 1999, 2007a, Baerman et al 2005:27-35, Stump 2006, Spencer 2007, Thornton 2011a, Paciaroni 2012, and Palancar 2012 For a canonical approach to phonology, specifically to tone, see Hyman 2009Hyman , 2011, and for derivational morphology and semantics see Fortin 2011. A working bibliography of research in canonical typology is available on the Surrey Morphology Group website.…”

The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi

“…Under one perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that the analyses of Sinclair & Pike (1948) and Leon & Swadesh (1949) are unable to account for the SJAO data, since their analyses were of Mezquital Otomi, a different language variety. Nevertheless, the Sinclair & Pike (1948) tonal analysis has been applied to every Otomi variety studied, including SJAO (Hernández-Green 2015) and the related dialects of Ixtenco (Lastra 1997), Tilapa (Palancar 2012), and San Pedro Atlapulco (Valle Canales 2008). Both the data and the analysis presented in this paper are quite different from those reported in Sinclair & Pike (1948) and Leon & Swadesh (1949); this paper is also among the first to present acoustic data (f0 traces and waveforms) from any Otomi variety (see also Valle Canales 2008, Volhardt 2014, Pharao Hansen et al 2016.…”

“…Sinclair & Pike's (1948) tonal analysis has become the received view in modern work on other varieties of Otomi, with most researchers positing three tones with limited or no restrictions on placement. Examples include the descriptions of the eastern variety of Highland (Sierra) Otomi (Blight & Pike 1976, Voigtlander & Echegoyen 1985); the southern varieties of Ixtenco Otomi (Lastra 1997), Tilapa Otomi (Palancar 2012), and San Pedro Atlapulco Otomi (Valle Canales 2008); the western varieties of Temoayan Otomi (Andrews 1949, 1993) and San Andrés Cuexcontitlán Otomi (Lastra 1989); and the northern varieties of Mezquital Otomi (Hess 1962, Wallis 1968, Cruz, Torquemada & Crawford 2004), Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hekking & Andrés de Jesús 1984, Hekking 1995), and San Idelfonso Tultepec Otomi (Palancar 2009). Other Oto-Pamean languages have been described in similar ways (see Arellanes et al 2011 for review).…”

Tres fuentes de las construcciones impersonales en otomí

“…En otomí de Tilapa y en otomí de Ixtenco podría darse también la estrategia de cambio de conjugación, ya que ambas variantes presentan clases léxicas (o conjugaciones) en verbos (Lastra 1997: 38-39;Palancar 2012). Si bien en otomí de Santiago Mexquititlán (Amealco, Querétaro) no se reportan conjugaciones verbales, algunos verbos que no presentan prefijo/mutación en construcciones impersonales reciben en cambio un prefijo N-similar al que se encuentra en la construcción perifrástica (Hekking y Andrés de Jesús 1984: 166-167) En otomí de San Ildefonso Tultepec no se considera la morfología media como una forma de codificar eventos con agente impersonal, pero los verbos medios ñ-'o̠ the 'ir a que le curen a uno', n-xithe 'bautizarse' y n-jöni 'confesarse' podrían calificar como tales, ya que expresan "recepción o afectación por parte del sujeto de otra acción que lleva a cabo otro participante agentivo que no está explícito, pero que es conceptualmente recuperable" (Palancar 2009: 162-163 …”

“…Para tal propósito, partiré de las descripciones gramaticales disponibles en la literatura (Hernández-Green 2015;Bartholomew 2010;Hekking y Andrés de Jesús 1984;Lastra 1992Lastra , 1997Palancar 2009Palancar , 2011Palancar , 2012Voigtlander y Echegoyen 1985).…”