Adjectives in Papantla Totonac
1
Paulette Levy
Papantla Totonac (PT) is spoken by about 80,000 speakers in the region around
the town of Papantla, in the Mexican state of Veracruz. PT belongs to the Totonac-
Tepehua family of languages, systematic reconstruction of which has not been un-
dertaken.^2 It is provisionally agreed that there are at least four varieties of Totonac
(Northern, Sierra, and Misantla, in addition to Papantla). One of the features in
which they differ is in the degree of syntactization of adjectives.
Research on the topic of adjectives in Totonac started as a reaction to the claim
in the literature, both for a Sierra variety (Coatepec Totonac) and for Misantla
Totonac, that words expressing property concepts cannot be formally distinguished
from nouns.
The words which, by virtue of their meanings, have been called adjectives in Spanish, are
in Totonac in no way formally distinguished from nouns. They may take the possessive
affixes and the plural suffixes just as all other nouns. (McQuown [1940] 1990: §18)
MacKay (1999) makes the same claim:
In Misantla Totonac, it is possible to distinguish adjectives from nouns semantically, but
adjectives cannot be defined as being formally distinct from nouns. (MacKay 1999:
345-6)
(^1) I gratefuly acknowledge the contribution to this chapter of the discussion during the Inter-
national Workshop on Adjective Classes, held in Melbourne, 12-17 August 2002, especially the in-
valuable input of the organizers, Bob Dixon and Sasha Aikhenvald, and the commentaries of Felix
Ameka, Grev Corbett, and Nick Evans. I presented the material at the Linguistics Department of
the University of Sydney, and I appreciate the input from Mark Donohue, Bill Foley, and Nick Rie-
mer. Thanks too to David Beck, Susana Cuevas, Veronica Vazquez, Roberto Zavala, and especially to
Janet Randall for her invaluable editing, English and otherwise. All errors and infelicities are mine.
My foremost thanks go to the speakers of PT who have shared the mysteries of their language with
me, the Gomez family: Lito, Mingo, Martha, Evarista. I am especially grateful to my beloved teach-
er, Natalio Garcia: pa:xkat ka'cini! The same to M. K., G. S., J. A., and A. L., who wanted to remain an-
onymous. The transcription is a version of the practical orthography where x = /s/, ch = /c/, c = /<t/
lh = l\l, tl = A./, j = /h/, V=laryngealized vowel, V: =long vowel; stress is graphically marked onl
when it occurs in a syllable different from the penult, unless change of stress to the penult is the only
surface trait of derivation, in which case it is graphically marked.
(^2) With the exception of a very preliminary phonological reconstruction by Arana-Osnaya (1953),
and a dialectological survey by Garcia-Rojas (1978), plus SIL intelligibility tests (Egland 1983).