Agreeing with subjects in number: The rare split of Amuzgo verbal inflection

Abstract

International audienceVerbs in San Pedro Amuzgo, an Oto Manguean language of Mexico, often have two different stems in the paradigm, one used with singular subjects and the other with plural subjects. This constitutes a split motivated by number which is typologically interesting due to its rarity, since number splits are commonly only associated with the S and the O arguments, but not S and A as subject. Apart from at stem level, the split is also manifested in the incompletive of an inflectional class of verbs. At stem level the plural stem is derived in a variety of unproductive ways, making the relation between a singular stem and plural stem, synchronically, one of suppletion. In this paper, we study the distribution and the morphological properties of this split in depth, using a sample of almost 600 fully inflected verbs from a large database compiled by native linguist Fermín Tapia and now publicly accessible online at http://www.oto manguean.surrey.ac.uk/ on the Surrey Morphology Group's website. We also place it in a typological context, relating it to other systems we have observed

Paradigmatic structure in the tonal inflection of Amuzgo

“…Santa María Ipapala Amuzgo remains undescribed. There have been linguistic studies on SP-Amuzgo, namely in Tapia García (1999), Buck (2000), and Smith-Stark & Tapia García (2002), and more recently Palancar and Feist (2015), Kim (2016), and Hernández Hernández (2019. Studies on Xochistlathuaca Amuzgo include the works by Apostol Polanco (2014), Herrera Zendejas (2014, and more recently Buck (2018) andDoBui (2018).…”

“…These efforts have recently come to fruition, with the data having been made available in an online database by Feist et al (2015), partially revised by linguist Yuni Kim (University of Essex). The database has served as the basis for recent studies such as Palancar and Feist (2015) and Kim (2016Kim ( , 2019. This paper is also based on the data in Feist et al (2015), more specifically on the analysis of the patterns found in a sample of 558 (active) verbs.…”

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

“…This is because they show that an inflected word's content and form fail to exhibit the kind of isomorphism that the morpheme concept predicts, and thus a holistic approach makes more sense (Stump 2016: 17, 22;Booij 2018a: 5, 18;Good 2018). Such an approach has been applied to various Otomanguean languages which exhibit complex inflectional paradigms, such as Mazatec (Léonard & Kihm 2010, Ackerman & Malouf 2013, Baerman 2013, Corbett 2015, Otomí (Palancar 2012), Chinantec (Baerman 2013, Baerman & Palancar 2015, and Amuzgo (Palancar & Feist 2015). A similar analysis has been proposed for Tlapanec, where tonal alternations as observed in Table 1 are assumed to be MORPHOLOGICAL (Suárez 1983, Tiburcio Cano 2017; that is, the tone melodies of verbs cannot be derived or predicted from the underlying representations of the stems and affixes, but rather the exponents of the agents are assumed to be non-concatenative tonal templates and different patterns of tonal alternations constitute different inflectional (or tone) classes.…”

Digital Humanities, Corpus and Language Technology: A look from diverse case studies

“…A pesar de que existen trabajos descriptivos importantes y notables (Buck, 2000(Buck, y 2018, la lengua no ha sido documentada ni descrita de forma exhaustiva. En términos gramaticales, el amuzgo se caracteriza por contar con un repertorio extenso de clases léxicas, lo que se manifiesta en una alta complejidad verbal (Smith y Tapia, 2002;Apóstol, 2014), un conjunto amplio de pronombres personales (Buck, 2015;Palancar y Feist, 2015), así como en el empleo de tonos fonológicos para la marcación de distintos significados morfológicos, tales como la posesión (Hernández et al, 2017;García et al, en prensa).…”