The Categorial Status of Body Part Prepositions in Valley Zapotec ...

VZ languages have six vowels, as presented in Table 2.
Table 2. Vowel Inventory of Valley Zapotec Languages in Orthography
front back
unrounded unrounded rounded
high i ë u
mid-high e o
low a
These vowels can have different tones: high, low, falling, and rising; and four
different phonation types. For SLQZ, Munro and Lopez et al. (1999) describe thirty-
three different combinations of vowel phonations 2 as they occur in a vowel complex in
the key syllable of a word. The following symbols are used in the orthography in relation
to phonation: ` above creaky vowels, h after breathy vowels, ' after checked vowels.
When ë is creaky, it is marked with a circumflex: ê. Munro and Lopez et al. (1999)
describe tone as predictable for any given phonation sequence.
For a detailed discussion of the phonemes and their allophones, please refer to
Munro and Lopez, et al. (1999).
Zapotec languages are head initial languages and most sentences have the
constituent order VSO, although the order SVO is also very common, especially for
TMZ. Consistent with head initial typologies, possessed noun phrases precede their
2 Munro and Lopez, et al. (1999) state, “Our analysis of SLQZ tone and phonation is
ongoing. We suspect that there may be several different rising and falling tone contours.
Further, two aspects of the description of vowel phonation… are subject to revision
depending on later discoveries.”
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