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This dissertation presents a description of the morphology and phonology of Zihuateutla Totonac (ZT), a member of the Northern branch of the Totonacan (Totonac-Tepehua) language family. Zihuateutla Totonac is spoken by about 1,100 people in northern Puebla State, Mexico. Previous to this study, ZT had no description of its linguistic features, and its relationship to other languages in the family has been poorly understood. Based on a documentation project conducted between 2013 and 2017, this research contributes to our knowledge of the unique linguistic properties of ZT that distinguishes it from other languages in the family. The outcome of this project includes a phrasal and textual corpus, a lexical database, and a detailed description of major phonological and morphological patterns. This description covers an overview of basic syntactic structures, the phonemic inventory, and general phonological processes. The bulk of this thesis involves the morphological patterns of the main word classes (verbs, nouns, adjectives, numerals, and adverbs). Of typological importance is the highly polysynthetic and agglutinative verbal morphology of ZT, which encodes categories for inflection and derivation, and categories that do not fall in either of these two domains. Nouns, adjectives, numerals, and adverbs also show some unique functions and morphological features that contribute to our understanding of the structure of natural language. The description of the inflectional and derivational properties is presented proceeding in the direction from form to function, showing regular and compositional patterns and then listing idiosyncratic or lexicalized expressions. The thesis contributes to our understanding of the dialectological relation of Zihuateutla to other languages in the Northern branch for which there is documentation and forms the basis of a linguistic record for typological studies and future generations.

International audience; Using the lexicon-grammar framework as developed by Maurice Gross (1994), we systematically analyzed 245 verbs that can be used as nominals with the light or support verb take. The data was divided into three main tables: purely intransitive verbs (e.g. bathe / take a bath), transitive (e.g. drink N1 / take a drink of N1), and intransitive with prepositional complements (e.g. look at N1 / take a look at N1). A final table demonstrates a set of converse take constructions as initially observed by Gaston Gross (1989), (e.g. N0 confess N1 to N2 ↔ N0 take confession ↔ N2 take the confession).

International audience; Using a lexicon-grammar approach developed by Maurice Gross (1992), this project involved systematically mapping the structural properties of over 550 transitive phrasal verbs with the particle "out", "PV out". The data is analyzed in terms of two main tables or matrices. The first table illustrates the morpho-syntactic properties of purely simple "PV out" expressions, like "freak out the kid" ↔ "freak the kid out". The second table illustrates the morpho-syntactic combinations of complex "PV out" expressions, as in "take the boxer out of the fight". The research shows that "PV out" expressions may involve up to 25 syntactic features, including N 2 promotion, as in "The girl spilled the water out of the glass" → "The girl spilled the glass out", complex-neutral constructions, like "The water spilled out of the glass", and reversed constructions, like "The company farmed the oil out of the land" →"The company farmed the land out of oil". The research shows that these syntactic combinations are highly lexical in that a unique combination of features applies to individual phrasal verbs.

International audience; Transitive phrasal verbs with the particle "out", "PV out", exhibit an intriguing variety of semantic combinations. The semantic properties of "PV out" can range from fully transparent to idiomatic entailing a spectrum of aspectual features, ranging from inchoative to exhaustive and varying degrees of intensification (Bolinger 1971, Fraser 1976, Brinton 1985, Svenonius 1996, Jackendoff 2002, Tyler and Evans 2003, Machonis 2009). While Machonis (2009) argued that compositional PV’s with "up" appear to vary from aspectual precision to stylistic concerns and even help with disambiguation, this study attempts to ascertain the various meanings associated with the particle out. We therefore constructed an exhaustive lexicon-grammar (Maurice Gross 1994) of 504 purely transitive "PV out" expressions indicating a continuum of 10 semantic features systematically characterized for the meanings that apply to individual phrasal verbs.