Winnebago accent: instrumental studies?

[Henning Garvin]

Don't know if you've seen any of my posts.  I am currently a Senior in
Linguistics at UW-Madison, graduating in a few weeks.  I am also Ho-Chunk,
and I have a job working at our Tribal Langauge Preservation Department
starting this summer.  I'd be happy to help out in any way possible.  Just
let me know what you are looking for.

The Language program has a fairly modern recording room, and I was already
planning on recording as much data as possible.

The next week and a half is busy (finals, papers, etc.) but I will be
starting work on the 19th of this month.  We can obviously correspond some
more and hammer something out.

Let me know what you think.

Henning Garvin
UW-Madison
Anthropology/Linguistics






>From: Nancy E Hall <nancyh at linguist.umass.edu>
>Reply-To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>Subject: Winnebago accent: instrumental studies?
>Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 19:32:48 -0400 (EDT)
>
>
>	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
>

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