Morphological diffusion and the internal subgrouping of Central Totonac

Abstract

The Totonac branch of the Totonacan (also known as Totonac-Tepehua) family is traditionally broken down into four divisions—Misantla, Northern, Sierra, and Lowland. Misantla is an obvious outlier, but the relationship among the remaining three, which comprise the Central Totonac division, is uncertain due to competing lines of evidence: lexical isoglosses group Sierra and Lowland against Northern while morphological changes appear to set Sierra off against the other two. The spatial distribution of the morphological innovations shows these not to be a coherent set of changes inherited from a common ancestor, but instead a series of successive innovations diffused in a wave-like pattern. This paper also demonstrates that the morphological innovations are more recent than the lexical changes, supporting the prior separation of Sierra-Lowland languages from Northern. The paper also explores the methodological issues associated with the classification of languages in close contact at shallow time depths.