Aspects of phonology and morphology of Teotepec eastern Chatino

This dissertation is a description of aspects of the phonetics, phonology and morphology of Teotepec Chatino (ISO 639-3 identifier: cya; here abbreviated as TEO), an indigenous language spoken by approximately 3800 people in the Sierra Madre del Sur, Oaxaca, Mexico. This work presents a synchronic description of the language based on data collected in the eld over the course of six eld trips totaling eighteen months. This investigation is based on a corpus of thirty hours of transcribed and analyzed texts of naturally occurring speech, narratives, data gathered during elicitation sessions, and an expansion of my earlier grammatical sketch (2011). The final result is a description of the phonology and phonetics of tone and some of the morphological processes that exist in the grammar. The focus of this work is to describe the structure of the language produced by native Teotepec speakers and how it is used in an array of contexts. This is reflected in a rich body of procedural texts, conversations, speeches, rants, polemics, prayers, and narratives. These texts are the basis for the description of how the language encodes speakers' knowledge about the world and their greater context. This work arrives at a description of the details of the language while also making broader generalizations about these details. It is not possible that this work cover all aspects of the phonology, phonetics, morphology and so part of the focus has been to capture particular facets of the language and explain them in a way that is detailed while broad enough to be useful to as many as audiences as possible. This includes scholars interested in typology, tone languages, historical linguistics of Otomanguean, linguistic anthropology, anthropology, and the history and culture of the Chatinos, southern Oaxaca and Mesoamerica. The dissertation is written in English; however, I often create grammatical write-ups and practical pedagogical materials for a Spanish literate audience. Materials for TEO have been and will continue to be made available to Spanish and English speakers in order to reach an audience that includes, but is not limited to, members of the community, local and regional educators and literacy efforts, and scholars engaged in the study of Chatino language and linguistics. The approach to this work is data-driven and text-based. It is written in basic descriptive terms, as outlined in Payne (1997); Shopen (2007); Dixon (2010), and Haspelmath (2010). In this way the writing is carried out with fewer aprioristic notions about the language. The goal is to describe the language in its own terms. Thus the researcher is open to discover completely new, unexpected phenomena, can be guided by the data and their own thinking (Haspelmath, 2010).