The Conjugations of Matlatzinca.

This article proposes that verbs in Matlatzinca (Otomian; Oto-Pamean; Oto-Manguean) fall into five inflectional classes, which the authors call 'conjugations'. The article focuses on the forms that make up the paradigms of these five classes. The conjugations of Matlatzinca are based on inflectional constructs that are largely periphrastic in composition, which means that the exponents in the constructions are not prefixes but behave like prosodic words, independent from the lexical stem of the verb being inflected. However, such exponents are not verbal auxiliaries but grammatical markers. We also show that class membership of the conjugations is determined by transitivity value. Three of the classes contain only transitive verbs, while the two remaining ones contain only intransitive verbs. One of the intransitive conjugations contains middle verbs. Transitive verbs are inflected as members of this middle class to obtain passive or middle voice readings. Wherever possible, the constructions are illustrated with examples from natural speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]