Eric Campbell Valency classes in Zenzontepec Chatino 1 Introduction This chapter outlines the basic valency patterns of Zenzontepec Chatino (ZEN). Chatino is a cluster of speech varieties in the Sierra Madre Mountains of southwest- ern Oaxaca State, Mexico. There are three principal varieties: Zenzontepec; Tatalte- pec; and the Eastern Chatino group (Boas 1913; Campbell 2013). Chatino is coordi- nate with Zapotec in the Zapotecan language family of the Otomanguean stock (Boas 1913; Kaufman 1987). ZEN is phonologically conservative and appears to be fairly representative of other varieties in terms of valency patterns, particularly the conservative Eastern Chatino variety of San Marcos Zacatepec. Innovative Eastern Chatino varieties like Yaitepec and San Juan Quiahije have lost non-prominent vowels, eroding some of the valency related morphology. No previous work on Chatino has systematically explored semantically based valency classes, but morphosyntax is treated in depth in Rasch (2002) and (less extensively) in Pride (2004). There have been several recent classifications of verbs based on the aspect prefix allomorphs that they se- lect (Campbell 2011; followed by Villard 2010; Sullivant 2011), which is determined in part by broad valency patterns but also by phonological factors. § 2 outlines basic ZEN morphosyntax and the structure of verbs. § 3 presents the major valency patterns (coding frames), and § 4 treats valency alternations. Finally, §5 gives a summary and conclusions. The table in the appendix lists the 70 core meaning labels selected for comparison and their ZEN counterpart verbs, coding frames, and the main alternations. 1 1 The practical orthography here differs from the IPA as follows: kw = [kʷ], tz = [ʦ], r = [ɾ], ty = [tʲ], ly = [lʲ], ny = [nʲ], ch = [ʧ], x = [ʃ], y = [j], ky = [kʲ], j = [h], V  = nasalized vowel, VV = long vowel, v = mid tone, and v = high tone. Unaccented vowels carry no lexical tone. The frequently occurring enclitics =VɁ and =V  contain a vowel mora that is underlyingly unspecified for quality. They take on the quality of the preceding vowel, even if a glottal stop intervenes. Where no glottal stop inter- venes, the host vowel is lengthened. Prefixes are set off by a hypen (-), enclitics are preceded by an equals sign (=), and component stems of compounds are separated by a plus sign (+). Vowel hiatus is only tolerated across clitic boundaries, and elsewhere one vowel is deleted in hiatus. Underlying vowels that end up deleted are enclosed in parentheses in the examples and tables. Campbell, Eric. 2015. Valency classes in Zenzontepec Chatino. In: Malchukov, Andrej & Comrie, Bernard (eds.), Valency Classes in the World’s Languages, vol. 2, 1391-1426. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.