A Grammar of Sochiapan Chinantec (review)

This book is the best description of an Otomanguean language to date. A revised version of the author’s 1993 Auckland University PhD dissertation, it is based on work carried out from 1970 to 1986 with subsequent field work aiding in the revision.

In Sochiapan Chinantec (Oaxaca, Mexico) most words are monosyllabic. Final syllables have seven tonal distinctions and two kinds of stress—ballistic and controlled. Nonfinal syllables do not carry stress distinctions, and only three tones are in play there.

Chinantec is head-marking; it marks the categories of animacy, person-of-subject, and transitivity on the verb. Dynamic verbs are inflected for tense, mood, motion, and aspect while state verbs are not. The verb is extraordinarily complex and full of irregularities. While tense-mood and person distinctions are generally expressed by tone and stress, there is also some segmental variation, and some verbs have suppletive forms in the plural. Thirty-one verbal prefixes serve to mark various categories such as hortative, evidential, tense-aspect, motion, etc.

The language is morphologically split ergative in the sense that transitive and intransitive subjects share inflexional patterns (accusative alignment) while animate subjects of intransitives as well as direct objects of transitives are marked in the same way (ergative alignment.) The inflexion maximally distinguishes four persons (1sg, 2, 3, 1pl), but a direct vs. inverse marking system serves to disambiguate transitive predicates and is furthermore a mechanism for tracking proximate vs. obviative subjects. Obviation only works where transitive predicates are involved.

The basic word order is VSO. A typological rarity is that there is only one complementation strategy. Topicalization involves the uses of two different kinds of markers, one of which encodes contraexpectation. Other pragmatic functions are encoded by a rich set of illocutionary adverbs and particles.

Chinantec men make use of whistle speech. According to Foris, virtually anything that can be expressed by speech can be communicated by whistling. He provides some examples and discussion of the phenomenon but not an in-depth analysis.

Overall the book sets high standards for a basic language description. I would like, however, to add a critical remark on the presentation of verbal inflexion. F presents the paradigms organized according to the different tense-aspect categories and each of the different person categories. The information that concerns the way a verb inflects for person within a given tense-aspect category is to be supplied in a dictionary that F is preparing. It would seem, however, that the person category is more fundamental to the organization of paradigms than tense-aspect. First, it is true of any language that in conversational adjacency pairs person is more frequently contrasted than tense-aspect. Second, whenever there are segmental features in Chinantec that frequently mark a particular category in the paradigm (glottal stop, vowel mutations), these will mark person rather than tense-aspect. Third, in the nominal inflexion the person category is the only inflectional parameter. The way the data is presented it is impossible to verify whether or not, as is the case in the Otomanguean language Azoyú Tlapanec (my field notes, 1991–1994), the nominal inflection actually exhibits the same paradigm as one of the many inflectional classes of verbs.

This impressive grammar is of particular interest to typologists concerned with any aspect of language structure as well as to students of Otomanguean and other Mesoamerican languages.