6 Adjectives in Papantla Totonac 151(6) kin-pa'xni 'my pig'
kin-pa'xni-ka'n 'our pig(s)'
*ki-sa'qsi' 'my sweet (one)'
Contrast the Misantla Totonac examples in (7), from MacKay (1999: 345), where
adjectives can be inflected for possession and may be the only element of an NP
(underlining of the inflected adjective that appears as the sole element of the NP
is mine, PL).
(7) /kit ik-la'qa'n-la(lh) ix-qa't/
I isuBj-see.X-PF 3POSS-big
'I saw her/his big one (dog).'
/ix-ci't Ihtatal
3POSS-black sleep
'Her/his black one (dog) sleeps.'
2.1.4.Nouns take plural suffixes; adjectives employ the distributive prefix. Nouns are
transnumeral or, in terms of Corbett (2000: 13), the system is one of general
number which opposes general/singular vs. plural. Plural marking is not a univer-
sal category for nouns (it follows roughly the Animacy Hierarchy; for details, see
Levy 1992: 282), and is not an obligatory agreement category within the NP. The
details of agreement in number of Subjects, Objects, and CCs at sentence level are
complex; plural usage in discourse has not been described for any of the Totonac-
Tepehua languages.^3 Nevertheless, that adjectives, as CCs, are distinct from nouns
with respect to plurality vs. distributivity marking should be taken as a rule of the
grammar—they can in principle carry the distinction.
As shown in (8), nouns in PT mark their plural with various suffixes, which all
share the presence of a nasal -N (-N, i.e. /-n/ after vowel, I-ml after consonant; -n V:
n, -ni:tni, etc). Adjectives entail plurality with a DISTRIBUTIVE prefix lak-llaq-.
(8) Nominal
kam 'son' kam-a:n 'sons'
kam-a:na:n 'sons'
cha':lhka:tna 'worker' cha':lhka:tna-ni:n 'workers'
ta':tatla 'sickperson' ta':tatla-ni:n 'sickpersons'
pa'xni 'pig' pa'xni-'n 'pigs>
chichi 'dog' chichi-ni':n 'dogs'
lhaqa':t 'clothes, sg' lhaqa':t-ni 'clothes, pi'
chiki' 'house' ka':chiki'-:n 'village, Papantla'
(ka':- LOG)
ka':chiki'-ni:n 'houses (Sp. caserio)'
(^3) Except very sketchily in Levy (2001), and in some scattered comments in MacKay (1999) and
Walters (1988).