Secuencias vs. unidades en las lenguas otomangues: los casos del tlapaneco (mè’phàà) y el zapoteco (dixsa:)

Since the pioneering work of Trubetzkoy (1939), there have been various proposals as to how to distinguish consonant clusters and units in individual languages. In this paper, I will look at the cases of Malinaltepec Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) and Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec (Dixsa:), two Otomanguean langua...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Uchihara, Hiroto
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2021
Country:México
Institution:EL COLEGIO DE MÉXICO
Repository:Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México
Language:English
Spanish
OAI Identifier:oai:oai.cuadernoslinguistica.colmex.mx:article/224
Online Access:https://cuadernoslinguistica.colmex.mx/index.php/cl/article/view/224
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:segmentos complejos
tipología canónica
tlapaneco
zapoteco
Description
Summary:Since the pioneering work of Trubetzkoy (1939), there have been various proposals as to how to distinguish consonant clusters and units in individual languages. In this paper, I will look at the cases of Malinaltepec Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) and Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec (Dixsa:), two Otomanguean languages. I will look at general and language-particular criteria to distinguish clusters and units in these languages. I will show that in both cases the criteria do not always converge: some sequences are judged to be clusters by certain criteria but as units by others. Based on these observations, and drawing insights from Canonical Typology (Brown et al. 2012), I argue that the distinction between clusters and units is not dichotomous, but multidimensional: individual cases may simultaneously resemble clusters in some aspects but units in others, thus the typology of behaviors is richer than a simple binary opposition.