FW: Reduplication

Rankin, Robert L rankin at ku.edu
Thu Jun 7 16:36:25 UTC 2001


<Pat Shaw's dissertation is a good start at describing Lakota
reduplication,but a more recent version is Trudi Patterson's work.

I've been working through these since my Siouan Conference paper deals
with it and second David's suggestion to start with Shaw 1980. Shaw
omits accent in a lot of her reduplication examples however. Carter 1974
does a better job with this aspect of things. Shaw and Carter are at
variance when it comes to certain forms also. This is probably due to
dialect differences. None of the treatments is truly congruent with any
of the others, probably due to the fact that different scholars tended
to concentrate on different aspects of the problem. A fair number of
phonological rules or constraints interact (syllabication, Ablaut,
reduplication itself, CVC final C lenition, coronal dissimilation,
accent, CCC-cluster constraints, nasalization, and this probably doesn't
exhaust the list), so it's far from a no-brainer. What looks simple at
first, isn't.

Riggs says at one point that active verbs seldom reduplicate, and he
neglects to give reduplicated forms for nearly all active verbs in his
dictionary. He does better with statives.

In Dhegiha languages, the problem is simpler (I think) because CVC roots
simply lost the second C in reduplication, whereas in Dakotan it is
subject to a variety of additional treatments -- some of which I will
talk about in a week and a half at the meeting.

Bob



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