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and viable. Despite societal pressures, Mazatec continues to be widely used in homes and between friends. As a general rule, children speak their mother’s language as well as the dominant community language and,
as they attend school, Spanish. The local government encourages indigenous language use and provides bilingual elementary education in the indigenous language spoken by the majority of constituents of each
school zone. Often, students entering the school system do not speak adequate Spanish
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to begin their education without transitional help in their primary language.
No one can predict with certainty the future of a language. It is important to document the language now while there are still many speakers and multiple generations available. Also, documentation
along with a usable orthography which will be enhanced by a better understanding of the tone system as provided by this dissertation may help preserve this language.
1.3 Motivation
There is a need for further study and documentation of Mexican tone languages such as Soyaltepec Mazatec. As noted by Yip, “Many of these languages have been very well described,” but she
adds, “There is relatively little recent theoretical work on their tonal systems” 2002:212-213. Pike 1956 noted Soyaltepec’s complex system of tone sandhi and gave numerous examples of
processes demonstrating its complexity as well as rules to predict surface tone from the underlying tones. Her analysis is meticulous; however, there are some remaining questions. For example, she describes a
rising tone which begins at the second highest level and rises to the highest level ˦˥.
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In context, this tonal contour often splits apart and the final tone links itself to the following syllable where sometimes, 1a, it
surfaces as a High tone ˥ as would be expected, and sometimes, 1b, it unexpectedly appears as a Mid-
high tone ˦.
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My information on the state of students in the school system is not scientific; it is based on personal communication with and the opinion of bilingual teachers.
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The tonal notations are discussed and explained in §1.5.1.
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1 Examples of Mid-high to High contour tone simplification
Rising contour Resulting tones
a. m a˧tʃ︢a˦˥
+ ts︢e˧
→ ma˧tʃ︢a˧ ts︢e˥
‘It grows’ ‘guava’
‘guavas grow’ b. t
s︢i˦˥ +
se˧ →
ts︢i˧se˦ ‘he makes’
‘thick’ ‘he thickens’
Furthermore, in Pike’s data, every time this contour simplification occurs, the level tone that remains on the original syllable is a Mid tone
˧. If the underlying tones are truly Mid-high and High, it is difficult to understand why after the contour simplification a completely different tone Mid surfaces on the original
syllable. Also, clarification is needed to determine when the resulting tone on the following syllable bears a High tone and when it bears a Mid-high tone. In the fifty-plus years since her work was published, there
have been several analyses of Pike’s data in efforts to understand this complex system and glean linguistic insights c.f., Biber 1981, Goldsmith 1990, and Pizer 1994, but none have taken into account all of the data
contained in Pike’s article. There has not been any further exploration of the tone system based on fresh data which either confirms or contradicts this unlikely behavior.
One of the complications of any analysis of tone is discerning which differences in tone are due to phonological processes and which are phonetic. In a system such as Soyaltepec Mazatec that employs so
many levels and contours, this can be especially challenging and the conclusions made are often debatable. Determining phonetic variations is not straightforward because the results at first can seem capricious, but
once understood, are very regular, even predictable. These results can include the raising or lowering of the original tone which can be motivated by either assimilation or dissimilation, as well as the formation of
contour tones which are usually the phonetic transition between the original tone and the triggering tone and therefore can be rising or falling. Also, like phonological changes, phonetic changes are predictable.
One difference between phonetic variation and phonological change is based in the need and ability to represent the change in terms of the abstract structure of the toneme. Phonetic changes result from the
mechanics of transition and the psychology of differentiation while phonological changes result from environmentally motivated structural manipulations. Neither Pike nor any of the subsequent analyses of
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Soyaltepec Mazatec make any differentiation between phonological tone processes and phonetic implementations. I will indicate tonal changes described by Pike which appear to be phonetic
implementations and give reasons for this assessment; however, the majority of the dissertation will focus on phonological changes which can be structurally described. This dissertation documents the tonal system
using original data and provides a phonological account which is internally consistent and explanatory of the surface forms present. I demonstrate tone sandhi that occurs and discuss register effects that are present.
An investigation of the literature surrounding phonological approaches to tonal languages with four level tones revealed little agreement among phonologists as to how tones should be represented. The
acceptance of Autosegmental Phonology means that phonologists agree that tones exist in a separate tier from the articulatory segments; however, what that tier looks like or if it has any imbedded structure has
been unresolved. A number of phonologists have explored the issue but, “In practice, most work on tonal phonology skirts the issue of the features and represents tones as H, M, L or with digits. . .” Yip 2002:
234. In fact, Hyman concludes that there is little advantage to treating tones more deeply than referring to their, “relative and scalar phonetic properties,” and suggests that linguists, “adopt the integer system even
for two-height systems: H, L = 2, 1, H, M, L = 3, 2, 1, and so forth.” Hyman 2009:19. The problem with ignoring the structure of tone in a complex system such as Soyaltepec Mazatec is there is no way to
make generalizations beyond descriptions, as will be evidenced below in §2.2 when Pike’s article is
discussed. When each toneme is a separate and distinct primitive, there is no way to describe natural classes or predict expected behaviors. If each primitive is one dimensional, there is no way to explain why a tone
articulated at the second to highest level of pitch in a language might cause syllables following it to be lowered as will be described in Chapter 5.
A detailed description and thorough investigation of the interesting and complex tonal system of Soyaltepec Mazatec will both augment the available literature regarding the tonal systems of the Americas
and provide an ideal venue for the exploring of tonal features which is so commonly skirted. Because Soyaltepec Mazatec has four level tones, multiple contours and rich sandhi, it is ideally suited to explore
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the necessity of correctly specifying tone features. I will demonstrate how the tone features and geometry described by Snider 1999 account for the phenomena present in Soyaltepec Mazatec.
1.4 Methodology
