Enrique L Palancar

In this paper, we explore how changes in the inflection class membership of verbs in Matlatzinca (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean, Mexico) lead to changes in both their valency and meaning. In Matlatzinca, verbs often exhibit multiple class membership so that a given verb may be inflected as transitive in one class but as intransitive in another. For instance, the verb CHUN+TA, when inflected in different classes, can encompass diverse meanings: the action of 'waking someone up'; the result state of 'being awake'; and the spontaneous event of 'waking up'. This linguistic phenomenon is intriguing from both a typological and a theoretical perspective as it challenges our understanding of lexical representation by prompting the question of whether these meanings represent distinct lexical entries or various construals of the same verb (Spencer 2013).

This paper has two main goals. One is to introduce a type of "headless" (or "antecedentless") relative clause that presents a gap strategy and that has not been sufficiently discussed in the typological literature. The other is to show that this type of headless relative clause with a gap is a characteristic trait of Mesoamerican languages, since it exists in many languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area as an important constructional option in their relativization syntax, independently of the genetic relationships of the language in question. Two types of headless relative clauses are well known to date: one involving a relativization strategy with a relative pronoun (e.g., I wore what you asked me to wear) and another with a light head, introduced by Citko (2004), somewhat comparable to I wore the one that you asked me to wear. The third type of headless relative clause discussed here presents a gap (i.e., there is no manifestation of the relativized term in the relative clause). It would be equivalent to saying 'I wore you asked me to wear'. The phenomenon we study here is interesting both from a typological and areal point of view.

In this chapter, we introduce the different headless relative clauses that exist in Matlatzinca. We show that headless relative clauses in Matlatzinca can be of different types, including free relative clauses. However, the most common type of headless relative clause is asyndetic; that is, it lacks both a complementizer and a relative pronoun. The next most common type is a light-headed relative clause headed by a pronominal demonstrative. In this chapter, we also show that maximal and existential free relative clauses are only built on wh-words such as 'who', 'what', and 'where'. These are basically the same wh-words that are naturally used in free-choice free relative clauses, although some speakers apparently also allow for the wh-word 'how much' in the latter. Finally, we show that headed relative clauses make use of most relativization strategies available for headless relative clauses, but not vice versa.

In this paper we introduce the object of study of this special issue of Amerindia, the inflectional classes of the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico, together with their most relevant typological characteristics. These languages are rich both in the variety of their inflectional systems, and in the way these are split into inflection classes. In effect, the full typological range of possible inflection class systems can be found just in this one stock of languages. This is illustrated through a survey of the variety of morphological forms, assignment principles, and paradigm structure, as well as the effects of combining multiple inflection class systems across different exponents within a single word form.

The Oto-Manguean Inflectional Class Database contains over 13,000 verbal entries from twenty Oto-Manguean languages, along with information pertaining to each verb's inflectional class membership.

Languages may express grammatical meaning by inflectional morphology, namely changes in word form: for example, in English, the ending -s is added to a verb form to show that it has a third person singular subject in the present tense. While English is fairly simple in this respect, there are other languages whose systems are more intricate. In particular, words may cluster into different classes according to the way they inflect, as in Spanish, where the ending for 'we' in 'we sing' (cant-amos) differs from the one in 'we want' (quer-emos), which in turn differs from the one in 'we open' (abr-imos).

In functional terms inflectional classes are apparently useless: the variation is quite independent of meaning, and must simply be memorized. But such systems are widely found across the languages of world, are highly structured and remarkably resilient over time. They represent a uniquely morphological sort of complexity whose implications for theories of language and the mind have yet to be adequately evaluated.

To date our knowledge of inflectional classes is largely based on European languages, and as such is limited by their typological characteristics. This database expands our horizons beyond this, focusing on the Oto-Manguean language phylum, which displays such an unparalleled diversity and richness of inflectional class systems that it can serve as a model of nearly the full range of typological possibilities.

The Oto-Manguean languages are spoken in Mexico, and number about 200, many of which are threatened or endangered. Their inflectional morphology takes on a rich array of forms, involving suffixes, prefixes, complex tonal patterns and stem alternations, all of which may fall into different inflectional classes. And since suffixes, prefixes, tone, etc. can co-occur in a single word form, this may result in the interaction of multiple layered inflectional classes, drastically increasing the complexity of the systems. The Oto-Manguean languages provide important evidence of the degree of the limits of inflectional idiosyncrasy that a language can tolerate.