Verbal Morphology and Prosody in Otomi

Abstract

Verbs in Otomi (Otopamean; Otomanguean) have two distinct inflectional forms whose selection is conditioned by an interesting combination of prosodic and syntactic factors. In this article, I describe these two inflectional forms and the factors that motivate their usage. The phenomenon studied here is not common crosslinguistically, given that it constitutes a rare case where different levels of linguistic organization are significantly interconnected at the time a clause is uttered.