The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

Some of the grammatical phenomena described herein which may be of interest to theoreticians and typologists include:

• Glottalization or aspiration and vowel devoicing to mark prosodic boundaries

• Postlexical nasal epenthesis at word-word and clitic-stem boundaries between a vowel and a stop or affricate

• Stress shift as a marker of interrogative utterances, which may occur on the verb or other sentencial elements

• A large set of ideophones marked by reduplication and sound symbolism in the categories of sound and manner of motion adverbials, colors, odors/flavors, and descriptive adjectives

• Complex inflectional combinatorics that feature long distance blocking, compositionality of certain person agreement markers, and glottalization and suppletion to mark second person subjects

• Typologically unusual free variation in the ordering of verbal morphemes in a middle zone of affixes on either side of the root, without scopal or semantic significance; mostly involving derivational affixes, but also including one inflectional prefix

• A gradient rather than categorical distinction between clitics and affixes, with the four relevant tests often giving conflicting results