Relative Clauses in Upper Necaxa Totonac: Local, Comparative, and Diachronic Perspectives

Abstract

Relativization strategies in the Totonacan family are largely undescribed, but detailed examination of one of the languages in the group, Upper Necaxa Totonac, reveals the presence of both externally-and internally-headed relative constructions.Also of note is the presence of relativizers that mark the animacy (human/non-human) of the head of the relative construction.This paper will show that, while phylogenetic evidence clearly demonstrates the relativizers to be descended diachronically from interrogative pronouns, they are best treated synchronically as complementizers, an analysis that follows directly from the presence of internally-headed relative constructions.Totonacan languages are spoken by approximately 240,000 people (INEGI 2010) living in an area of east-central Mexico centred on northern Puebla State and including adjacent parts of Hidalgo and Veracruz (see Figure 1; languages dealt with directly in this paper are shown in red).The family is generally considered an isolate; however, recent work has suggested links to Mixe-Zoque (Brown et al. 2011) and Chitimacha (Brown et al. 2014).Although the family has only recently become the object of serious investigation and description, the focus has been largely on its (admittedly spectacular) morphology; little has been written about syntax, and even less about the structure of complex clauses.Relative clauses in particular seem to have been given short shrift-which is surprising, given that from what we do know about them they seem to have some unusual properties.Consider the example in (1) from Upper Necaxa Totonac, the language for which we currently have the most data on relativization: 2 1 I would like to thank my consultants in Patla and Chicontla, especially Porfirio Sampayo Macín and Longino Barragán Sampayo, for their help putting this paper together.

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