Winnebago accent: instrumental studies?

[Nancy E Hall]

	I'm writing to ask whether anyone knows of phonetic studies on
Winnebago accent, and if not, whether anyone would be interested in
collaborating on one.
	There has been much discussion and many competing theories of
Winnebago accent, but as far as I know, no published phonetic work on the
phenomenon. Such a study would be useful, because there are some
contradictions among different sources as to where accent falls,
particularly in Dorsey's Law (DL) sequences. Miner 1979 shows DL words
like [kere] with a secondary accent on the first vowel and primary accent
on the second vowel. But he notes: "perceptually, in the nonreduplicated
fast [DL] sequences, it sometimes happens that the secondarily accented
syllable has almost as much accent as, or even as much as (but never more
than) the primarily accented one. It may be this that caused Lipkind to
write stress only on the C1V1 portion of fast sequences, an error which
persists through Wolff to Matthews and beyond." In later writings,
however, Miner omits the secondary accent, showing only a primary accent
on the second vowel. This last transcription is what's assumed by most
theoretical studies, and it's rarely acknowledged that three different
transcriptions of these words have been proposed: primary accent on first
vowel; primary accent on second vowel; and primary accent on second vowel
with secondary accent on first.
	I've recently been making pitch tracks from tapes of Gerd
Fraenkel's elicitation sessions (the only audio material I've been able to
track down), which are archived at IU. In the two tokens I've found of a
DL sequence in isolation, the pitch track shows a fairly level pitch
throughout the two vowels, perhaps with a very slight rise on the second,
and then a small fall at the end. This constrasts dramatically with non-DL
disyllables, in which the second vowel clearly has higher pitch than the
second. In other words, the pitch tracks seem more consistent with an
analysis that does assign some accent to the first vowel of a DL
sequence-- or in some other way distinguishes their accentual structure
from that of regular disyllables.
	Of course, this observation is based on only two tokens, and I
don't know whether dialect differences, list intonation, etc. might be
involved. Nevertheless, the fact that this discrepancy comes exactly in
the case where there has been disagreement about the data suggests there
may be something to it.
	Is there anyone who has contact with Winnebago speakers who would
be interested in eliciting some data to test this hypothesis? I'd be
happy to do all the phonetic analysis, but cannot do fieldwork anytime
soon.

--Nancy Hall

Rutgers University