Dorsey's Law

[Nancy E Hall]

	Right- and they also count as monosyllables for reduplication.
It seems like there are some good phonological arguments for
monosyllabicity in the Winnebago case, so I'm curious whether there is any
external support from metrics, pausing tests, tapping tests, speaker
comments, etc. the way there is in Gaelic.
	I've listened to some tapes of Winnebago elicitation by Fraenkel,
and my impression is that when the consultant is producing words
emphatically in isolation, he sometimes pauses slightly between syllables,
but not within a Dorsey's Law sequence. But this evidence isn't strong,
unless it can be corroborated by an actual fieldworker.

Nancy

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, ROOD DAVID S wrote:

> A very quick answer which someone else will probably elaborate on:
> Winnebago speakers do treat the Dorsey's law sequences as single syllables
> for purposes of assigning stress.  Stress is normally on the first or
> second syllable of non-Dorsey's law words, but on the second or third for
> Dorsey's law forms.  I'm sure Ken Miner has written this up in detail
> somewhere.
> 	David
>
> David S. Rood
> Dept. of Linguistics
> Univ. of Colorado
> 295 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0295
> USA
> rood at colorado.edu
>
> On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Nancy E Hall wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > 	I am writing a dissertation on epenthetic vowels, and have a few
> > questions about those that are inserted by 'Dorsey's Law' in Winnebago and
> > other Siouan languages.
> >
> > 1. 	Are there any examples of loanwords that have undergone Dorsey's Law?
> > (I'm looking for evidence that it's synchronically productive).
> >
> > 2. There's a similar-looking process of copy-vowel epenthesis between
> > sonorants and obstruents in Scots Gaelic:
> >
> > /tarv/ -> [tarav]
> > /merg/ -> [mereg]
> > etc.
> >
> > (similar conditioning environment to Dorsey's Law, except that the
> > sonorant and obstruent are in the opposite order)
> > 	An interesting thing about the Scots Gaelic process is that native
> > speakers seem to find the resulting sequence ([tarav]) monosyllabic in
> > some respects- they have difficulty pausing within it, sing it on one
> > note, count it as one syllable when asked to count the syllables of a
> > word, etc.
> > 	Does anyone know how native speakers view Dorsey's Law segments?
> > Have any tests for intuitions about syllabicity been tried?
> >
> > Nancy
> >
>