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Register and Tonal Representation in San Juan Piñas Mixte (Colloquium)

Gabriela Caballero

UC San Diego

Dewey 1101 Auditorium

In collaboration with Claudia Duarte Borquez, Claudia Juárez Chávez, Basi Juárez Chávez & Basi Perez Morelos.

Mixtec tone systems documented to date exhibit elaborate sandhi phenomena and typologically unusual register effects, but individual varieties differ in terms of the nature and number of register phenomena attested (Pike 1948, Dürr 1987, Daly & Hyman 2007). These phenomena are generally analyzed in these varieties as resulting from floating tones and tonal primitives (Hinton et al. 1991, Macaulay 1996), though register feature analyses have also been proposed (Snider 1998, Penner 2019). In this talk, I address the tonal register phenomena of San Juan Piñas Mixtec (Tò’ōn Ndá’ví), a previously undocumented variety. In San Juan Piñas Mixtec, register effects include downstep of M and H tones and upstep of H tones, as part of a system of lexically conditioned tone sandhi that yields 6 phonetic level tones in different contexts. While downstep is both cumulative and unbounded, affecting the entire tonal sequence in the phonological phrase, upstep is strictly local and is followed by a lowering of the tonal register.

The San Juan Piñas Mixtec tone system involves three underlying tonal primitives and tonal representations that involve floating L tones and a contrast between underlyingly specified M-toned tone-bearing units (TBUs) and underlyingly toneless /Ø/ TBUs. These representations are independently motivated in lexical-grammatical tone interactions and tonal processes that apply in different prosodic domains (Caballero et al. 2026). In this talk, I evaluate competing analytical approaches to San Juan Piñas Mixtec register phenomena given the properties of the tonal system, and consider tradeoffs in complexity between different representational options. In particular, I assess whether (i) tonal primitives, floating L tones and their interaction are sufficient to analyze the phenomena, or whether (ii) register features are required to model tonal categories and if so, how.