Monday, March 5, 2012

Zapotec valence pairs

Working today on valence in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec.  The problem in a lot of these languages is that there are so many different morphological relationships between any two members of a valence pair.

For this variety of Zapotec at least, there are at least the following:
  1. Equipollent  (less transitive has a lenis initial C; more transitive has the corresponding fortis C
  2. Less transitive derived from more transitive
    1. d- replaces initial g-
    2. y- replaces an initial C (usually g-, but sometimes another C)
    3. bi- replaces tsi- or dzi- syllable
  3. More transitive derived from less transitive
    1. prefix gu- added to root
    2. prefix or infix u- added to root
    3. prefix s- or sa- added to root
Here is part of the chart that I am working on:



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