Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary

The Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary represents to-date the most extensive collection of lexical material for any member of the Totonac-Tepehua family and the only such record for this previously-undescribed polysynthetic language, currently spoken in two principal dialects by some 3,400 people, mainly adults, in the Sierra Norte of Puebla State, Mexico.

As well as a short grammatical sketch, the dictionary comprises 9,000 lexical entries, including numerous fixed expressions, idioms, and ideophones; each lexical entry is accompanied by part-of-speech information and phonetic transcriptions as well as, where appropriate, dialectal information, grammatical notes (including plurals and classifiers for nouns), literal morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, example sentences, and cross-references to derived forms and semantically-related words. The accompanying DVD includes additional illustrative sentences, audio recordings of headwords and examples, and interlinear glosses for many of the sentences included in lexical entries.

This book is the first Totonacan dictionary to be structured for the academic linguist, with special attention paid to the morphological structure of words and the organization of the Totonacan lexicon. Glosses are constructed so as to reflect the underlying complement-structure of words, with careful indication of the number of arguments required by particular lexical items, and all verbs are classified by dynamicity and valency. This dictionary is of interest to linguists working on American indigenous languages, as well as those concerned with the structure of morphologically complex words and the role of derivation in the lexicon of polysynthetic languages. It is also of use to historical linguists and Mesoamericanists interested in the reconstruction of the pre-Columbian history and ethnogeography of Mexico.

David Beck, University of Alberta, Canada.