Paradigmatic structure in the tonal inflection of Amuzgo

Abstract

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

Is grammatical tone item-based or process-based?

“…Other potentially ambiguous cases come from highly paradigmatic tonal systems such as those of Oto-Manguean languages, including Amuzgo (Kim 2016; Palancar 2021) & varieties of Mixtec (McKendry 2013; Zimmermann 2018). It is not clear that there is a single right answer to whether complex paradigmatic tonal systems should be analysed as item-based, suppletive or process-based; all such analyses exist in the literature.…”

Swahili verbs and the value of abstractive accounts for agglutinating inflection

“…A prominent concern of current morphological theorists is to develop holistic descriptions of entire inflectional systems, quantifying the overall complexity of the systems, exploring their organisational properties and identifying predictive generalisations about the behaviour of inflected forms (see e.g. Stump & Finkel 2013, Bonami 2014, Maiden 2018, Beniamine 2021, Feist & Palancar 2021, Palancar 2021. By contrast, to the extent that Swahili inflection figures in morphological discussion, it is in the context of illustrating morpheme-based approaches.…”

Grammatical and lexical sources of allomorphy in Amuzgo inflectional tone

“…Since, as we saw in (2), tonal inflection in plurals does not use overwriting as its primary mechanism, and since plural tones appear to be unaffected by mor phological derivation such as causative formation, they do not participate in the phenomena of interest in this article and we will not consider them further here. However, it is important to note Palancar's (2021) finding that there are patterns and restrictions in the relationships between singular and plural lexical tones, and that inflection classes can and probably should be defined based on the entire tonal paradigm.…”

“…This situation arises in person/number marking in Amuzgo, an Otomanguean language of southern Mexico. The main system of tonal inflection is based on a large number of lexically arbitrary tonal-inflection classes (Kim 2016; Palancar 2021). However, in derived causatives, the tones associated with a root’s inflection class do not surface; instead, we find a system of phonologically conditioned allomorphy that is driven primarily (though not exclusively) by the underlying lexical tone of the verb root.…”

“…Palancar (2021) extracts 290 causatives from the same source. The slight discrepancy most likely arises from differences in the counting of homophonous roots with identical inflectional properties that appear in multiple lexical items, for example, in combination with different prefixes -as in (9) -or in phrasal verbs.…”