Lexical and grammatical tone in San Juan Piñas Mixtec (Tò’ōn Ndá’ví)

This paper presents the first detailed investigation of the lexical and grammatical tonal patterns of San Juan Piñas Mixtec (SJPM; Tò’ōn Ndá’ví), a previously undocumented language variety spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, and diaspora communities in the US. We show that SJPM exhibits a high number of contrastive tone patterns in stems, resulting from the concatenation of three tonal primitives (H, L, and M). The lexical tone system of this language variety also involves a typologically unusual contrast between underlyingly specified M-toned tone-bearing units (TBUs) and underlyingly toneless /Ø/ TBUs. The lexical tone patterns in SJPM moreover exhibit complex interactions with grammatical tone, a system analyzed through the association of morphosyntactically-triggered tonal melodies (L, H, and LH), which may replace or accommodate lexical tone. We analyze grammatical tone in this language as non-dominant neutral within a dominance theory of grammatical tone (Rolle 2018). The asymmetries observed in lexical-grammatical tone interactions result from the avoidance of phonotactically marked tonal sequences. In these cases, we argue that lexical tonal contrasts are sacrificed in order to preserve the morphological contrasts in paradigms if the phonological grammar prevents concatenation of grammatical and lexical tones.