The Morpho-syntax of Indefinite Pronouns in Iliatenco Me'phaa

In this thesis I investigate the indefinite pronoun system of Iliatenco Me'phaa, an Otomanguean language from Guerrero, Mexico. I adopt a primarily descriptive approach in order to provide an account of salient properties pertaining to morphological derivation and syntactic distribution of indefinite pronouns in the language, which are mainly based on the numeral `one'. The analysis I present follows the typological approach developed in Haspelmath (1997). Indefinite paradigms with a robustly developed series of `one'-based pronouns are considered to be cross-linguistically rare (Haspelmath 1997:20). However, in Haspelmath's extensive survey, Otomanguean languages, specifically, and Mesoamerican languages, more generally, are severely underrepresented. Thus, Iliatenco Me'phaa constitutes a potentially unique case to apply Haspelmath's typological framework. I demonstrate that the Iliatenco Me'phaa system of indefinites exhibits a cross-linguistically unexpected pattern where the numeral `one' is the primary base for deriving indefinite pronouns. Moreover, I present data from other Mesoamerican languages to suggest that `one'-based systems may not be as rare as previously thought. However, the indefinite pronoun system in Iliatenco Me'phaa does reflect a common tendency for languages to encode a person vs. non-person distinction through the way that indefinites are derived. In addition to contributing to the growing literature on Me'phaa varieties and to the morpho-syntax of Otomanguean languages, this work contributes to the overall typology of indefinites by providing a new and empirical test of Haspelmath's claims