TLATEPUZCO CHINANTEC

Sources of the data

Merrifield, W. R. and A. E. Anderson. 2007. Diccionario Chinanteco de la diáspora del pueblo antiguo de San Pedro Tlatepuzco, Oaxaca . [2nd Edition] (Serie de vocabularios y diccionarios indígenas “Mariano Silva y Aceves” 39). Mexico DF: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. Available online.

Palancar, Enrique L. 2014. Revisiting the complexity of the Chinantecan verb conjugation classes, in Jean-Léo Léonard & Alain Kihm (eds.), Patterns in Meso-American Morphology, pp. 77-102. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur. Available online.

Baerman, Matthew and Enrique L. Palancar. Forthcoming. The organization of Chinantec tone paradigms. Cahiers de Grammaire. Available online.

Verbal inflection

The database gives the transitivity value of each verb, as given in the source material.

intr

intransitive

tr

transitive

dtr

ditransitive (besides typical ditransitives, it also includes verbs that take an instrument as a secondary object)

Verbs in Chinantec agree in animacy with the S or the O argument. Every entry in the database gives information about this animacy value:

an O

animate O

inan O

inanimate O

inan S

inanimate S

an S

animate S

There are two main types of verbs: stative verbs and dynamic verbs (also called ‘active verbs’). The database only includes information about dynamic verbs because stative verbs remain poorly understood to date.

Dynamic verbs

Dynamic verbs fall into two types: (i) simple verbs, which consist of a mono-morphemic and (mostly) monosyllabic root:

húʔ¹² (tr) ‘bend’; ʔlianʔ¹² (tr an) ‘push’; gøi² (intr) ‘break down’, etc.

and (ii) bi-partite verbs (also called ‘binomial’), which originate from old V+V compounds, and are thus disyllabic and consist of two morphs. Bi-partite verbs have a number of inflectional idiosyncrasies of their own.

u²+ʔai¹² (intr an) ‘go out’; guu²+dsë́n¹³ (tr an) ‘ride’; mi²+lei¹³ (tr) ‘show’; etc.

The inflection of dynamic verbs can be very complex. Verbs have three main inflected stems, which the sources take as sufficient to reconstruct the full paradigm of a verb. These are:

• Incompletive stem (also called present or progressive stem)
• Completive stem (also called past stem)
• Irrealis stem (also called future or intentive stem)

Such inflected stems are built on a segmental base to which tone and pharyngealization (the so-called ballistic stress, represented by an acute accent) are added.

Inflected stems also convey information about grammatical person; the maximal person distinction involves four persons: 1SG, 1PL, 2 and 3. An example of the paradigm of a maximally inflected verb is presented below with the paradigm of the verb húʔ² (tr) ‘bend’. The shaded cell is the citation form used in Merrifield and Anderson's dictionary.

The different grammatical tenses are built by adding TAM prefixes (at times also in the form of prefix series and proclitics) to the different stems. For example:

Conjugation patterns – analysis in source

All the verbs above share the property of belonging to the paradigm type called ‘A’. Merrifield and Anderson propose four such paradigm types.

The ‘A’ type. Verbs of this type have maximal person distinctions.

The ‘B’ type. Verbs of this type have two person distinctions: 3rd and non-3rd.

The ‘C' type. Verbs of this type have no person distinctions. C-type verbs include verbs with distinctions of aspect and mood and uninflecting verbs, which have a lexical tone throughout.

The ‘D' type. Verbs of this type are like verbs of Type C, but they only inflect for the 3rd person.

Tone classes – our analysis

To understand how inflectional classes are organized in Chinantec, we propose a different way of classifying verbs to that presented in the source material.

Under our proposal, the marking for 3rd person is treated as independent from the marking of other persons. Notice that húʔ² ‘bend’ and kán² ‘take’, on the one hand, and tsiʔ¹² ‘put’ and nëʔ¹² ‘swallow’, on the other, have the same marking for 3rd person, but kán² ‘take’ and tsiʔ¹² ‘put’ have the same marking for all other persons, while the same is true for húʔ² ‘bend’ and nëʔ¹² ‘swallow’. Hence for us, these verbs belong to two classes independently.

Classes for 3rd person

Under our analysis, there are 11 classes for the 3rd person, one of which is a class of verbs which show no tonal variation in the 3rd person.

Classes for other persons

Note that in this table, the first column labels the verbs as either Type A or Type B, corresponding to Merrifield and Anderson's classification. In addition to these classes, the database also signals lexemes which are unique or irregular.

Inflection of bi-partite verbs

In the inflection of a bi-partite verb, both morphs have inflectional properties. The first morph inflects according to a fixed pattern, while the second, the morphological root, may have inflectional forms similar to simple verbs.