Pitch Accent

[Koontz John E]

In regard to pitch accent in Mississippi Valley Siouan, something that has
come up some recently on the list and in associated discussions I've had
off the list, I thought it might be interesting to report that Nancy Hall
showed me last year some pitch traces of Winnebago words that, to my mind,
more or less matched the phonetic descriptions of Winnebago accent given
by Miner.  The issue of how and whether Winnebago accent can be predicted
is, of course, a separate issue that the traces per se can't resolve, and
I understand Hall's own interest to be Winnebago vowel epenthesis.

However, for me there were two interesting additions to Miner's picture in
Hall's traces.  One was that word initial high pitch sequences were not
acoustically level, but drifted gradually upward, albeit from a low point
higher than the end of the final low sequence.

The other was that in one word there was a clear initial low sequence.
This word was given as waruc^ in Hall's source, but looked to me like it
might be waaruc^, given the relative length of the initial sequence.  The
word terminated in an abrupt rise and a sliding fall looking like a
transition to and an abbreviated instance of the usual HL pattern.
Perhaps MVS has initial L sequence words (LHL) as well as HL words, like
Crow, though I believe that Crow has LHL words only with initial sequences
of short vowels.

I thought this might be interesting in view of our wa-prefix discussions
and pondering whether some of the wa-prefixes might contrast in form as
well as function.  We had considered only length, not pitch behavior.
Of course, this won't help the Dakotanists, as they report non-pitch-based
accent.

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz