The dissertation is a basic description of segmental phonology, tone, and the functions of tone in the San Juan Quiahije (SJQ) variety of Eastern Chatino. Chatino languages are spoken in the southern part of Oaxaca, Mexico. Chatino languages form a subgroup that is coordinate with the Zapotec languages in the Zapotecan family of the Otomanguean linguistic stock. The dissertation focuses on the sound system of SJQ Chatino, its system of tones, and the lexical, morphological, and syntactic functions of the tone system. SJQ Chatino is of special interest because it is a Chatino variety that has reduced nearly all historic simple stems to monosyllables, leaving behind complex consonant clusters; it has an exceptionally large tone system and complex system of tonal sandhi; the tones mark significant grammatical contrasts in addition to lexical units; and tone sandhi is significant in cuing syntactic and discourse structure. This description starts with an introduction to the language, its language family, a typological overview, a brief history of my fieldwork, and the methodology undertaken in this study. The work then describes the segmental phonology, including syllable structure and the distribution of the consonant and vowel phonemes, and the tones and tone sandhi, arguing for a system of fourteen contrastive tones at the lexical level. The work then turns to the functions of tone, including the restrictions on the lexical tone system according to the part of speech, with special emphasis on numeral words; the use of tone in marking possessor person and number in inalienably possessed nouns, and in marking aspect and subject person and number in verb; and tone in Spanish loan words. The description and analysis of these aspects of Quiahije Chatino is based on data gathered through elicitation and oral texts as well as my own intuitions as a native speaker of SJQ Chatino. / text

The verb in a Chatino language bears a value for Aspect (a grammatical category of Zapotecan verbs which indicates a bundle of aspectual and modal features), marked with a prefix, a tonal change, or both. There is a moderate amount of allomorphy among the Aspect prefixes, and when verbs of Tataltepec Chatino are grouped according to in which particular forms a given verb’s Aspect prefix appears, generalizations about the verbs can be made. For example, verbs with one set of allomorphs are are generally transitive; verbs with another set are generally intransitive, and so on. Attempts to meaningfully classify the verbs of contemporary Tataltepec Chatino are complicated by the effects of a few incomplete processes, such as the syncopation of historically disyllabic roots. To overcome this difficulty, a more conservative form of Tataltepec Chatino was constructed from an analysis of the lexical entries of a bilingual dictionary published in 1970 and from my own field notes. This pre-1970 Tataltepec Chatino shows the Aspect prefixes quite clearly and allows for a ready classification of the verbs. When the verb classes which can be identified for Tataltepec Chatino are compared to those found for other Chatino languages, we can see the development of several subclasses being brought about by various morphophonemic processes, such as the syncopation of Aspect prefix vowels, the deletion of similar consonants, and the merger of coronal and velar stops before laterals. This verb classification also corroborates those undertaken for Zenzontepec Chatino and the Eastern Chatino of San Marcos Zacatepec, as this verb classification scheme is largely in concord with them or if not, convincing explanations of Tataltepec Chatino’s deviance can be found. / text

This dissertation is an analysis of aspects of the phonology and morphology of Zenzontepec Chatino (ISO 639-3: czn), a Zapotecan (Otomanguean) language spoken in a remote area of Oaxaca, Mexico (16°32"N, 97°30"W). There are an estimated 8,000 speakers of the language, but its vitality is weakening due to accelerating shift to Spanish. The phonological analysis begins with the segmental inventory. After that, the autosegmental contrasts are treated, with the highlight being the tone system. The tone bearing unit is the mora, which may bear high tone /H/, mid tone /M/, or no tone Ø. In tone systems with a three-way contrast, the unspecified category is usually the mid-level one. Therefore, Zenzontepec Chatino is typologically unusual in this respect. Special chapters are devoted to phonotactics and phonological processes, including a play language of "speaking backwards" that sheds light on crucial phonological questions, such as the status of glottalization and the limits of prosodic domains. There are also chapters on special topics in phonology: regional variation, Spanish loanwords, and sound symbolism. Another chapter bridges the phonology and the morphology, defining and comparing the phonological word versus the grammatical word, and outlining the basic morphological building blocks: roots, affixes, clitics, and particles. After that, lexeme classes are defined using morphosyntactic criteria, providing a syntactic sketch of the language. The language is strongly head-marking with somewhat agglutinating and synthetic morphology. Another chapter gives an overview of verbal morphology, which is the locus of most of the language's morphology. The dissertation is the beginning of a full descriptive grammar and is part of a larger project to document Zenzontepec Chatino, complementing a dictionary and a documentary text corpus recorded in the community with native speakers. The theoretical approach is one in which the language is explored as much as possible on its own terms using naturalistic textual data supplemented by lexicographic and elicited material. The analysis is not bound by any formal framework, but it is informed by socio-cultural and diachronic considerations. It is situated in a typological perspective to offer more of a contribution to the scientific understanding of the structure of human language. / text