draft of the Zapotec valence chapter

I finished and sent off my draft for the chapter on valence morphology in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec today.  It is intended for a volume from Brill that Aaron Sonnenschein and Natalie Operstein are editing.

Here is the beginning of it.  Write me if you would like a copy of the draft.

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:

Zapotec valence

Reading through the description of a proposed volume for Brill on valence-changing devices in Zapotecan languages. I'd like to contribute something on San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec.

Following Kaufman, the editors (Aaron S and Natalie O) talk about *o- as one of the markers of causative, but I have always thought of it in the terms that Briggs (1961) (and maybe Pickett, but I don't remember) laid out, where some of the aspect markers have two allomorphs. So the habitual is ru- for some verb classes and ri- for others, but the -u and -i portions of these prefixes are not synchronically segmentable.

Also, an interesting comparison to the causative in Copala Triqui, which is usually tuk- added to the verb. The t- portion here is cognate to si- or ti-/di- prefixes in Zapotec and Chatino; the u- is possibly cognate to *o-, and the k- to the fortition prefix.