6 Adjectives in Papantla Totonac 165*chi'xku chiwi-.ndn Juan
*xachi'xku chiwi-.ndn Juan
(36) snu:n qu-.luta kimpapa
snu:n qu:lu=ta kin-papa
very old=already iposs-grandfather
'My grandfather is already very old.'
snu:n qa'wasajku kinta'-.kam
snu:n qa'wasaj=ku kin-ta':-kam
very young=still iPOSS-coM-son
'My brother is still very young.'
As with the DIMENSION adjectives, all the words for stages-in-life show double
marking for the plural, employing both the adjectival technique (lak-llaq-) and the
nominal one (all sorts of-N suffixes), as can be seen in (37). In this case, though,
there are no variations employing only the DISTRIBUTIVE. It is either the nominal
form or, more frequently, both.
(37) Plural forms of nouns that denote 'man', woman, plus stage-in-life terms:
qa'wasa 'boy' laq-qa'wasa-n
chi'xku 'man' chi'xkuw-i':n
lak-chi'xkuw-i':n
sqa'ta' 'baby' sqa'ta'-:n
laq-sqa'ta'-:n
qu:lu 'old.man laq-qu:lu-n
puska:t 'woman' lak-puska:t-i:n
cu'ma:t 'young.girl' lak-cu'maj-an
cha':t 'old.woman lak-chaj-an
Co-occurrence of DISTRIBUTIVE and nominal plural marking is well attested typo-
logically for nouns (Corbett 2000:114). The distribution of the co-occurrence does
not follow the constraints expected from the Animacy Hierarchy, which is one
of the criteria that Corbett adduces for not considering distributives as a basic
number value, along with singular, plural, dual, etc. As we have seen, this co-occur-
rence in PT happens both with nouns in the upper part of the hierarchy, and also
with DIMENSION adjectives. This double marking on nouns high in the Animacy
Hierarchy and on adjectives seems to be an areal trait.^8(^8) Kimball (1990:198) describes the same phenomenon for Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, the variety
of Nahuatl spoken in exactly the same geographical area as the Totonac-Tepehua languages. The ad-
jectives he discusses are DIMENSION adjectives, and he considers that 'the marking of animacy in
plural formation [i.e. the nominal technique] has spread to adjectives' (Kimball 1990: 198). If Toto-
nacan shows idiosyncratic irregularities in the nominal pluralization of DIMENSION terms in all of
its varieties (§3.4), and the Nahuatl of the area does not, the direction of diffusion must be from the
former to the latter.