reduplication

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 13 May 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> What is true for John's Omaha examples is also true for Kansa.  I did
> not get a lot of reduplication, but when I did, it seemed mostly to
> signal iterative aspect.

Looking at just the reduplication examples that had turned up accidentally
in the bodypart gender examples, I'd have to say that an iterative sense
is at least as common as the distributive gloss I suggested.  The 'greasy
hands' example is probably distributive.  The 'tangled hair' example could
be taken as completive, i.e., 'thoroughly tangled'.  These chance examples
weren't particularly instructive as to morphology, but one thing I think
they did convey well was that you could find a fair number of examples of
reduplication even in a small sample from the Dorsey corpus and that they
were used in a fairly spontaneous way, i.e., they were not just a few
lexicalized fossil forms.  At the same time they are not integrated into
the grammar of verb stem plurality as they are in Dakotan.  It's a
deriational device, but though pervasive and probably productive, not so
frequent as to be particularly noticeable.  I think most students of
Dhegiha take them to be perhaps less common than they really are.

I don't recall any examples of reduplicated numerals in Dhegiha such as
there are in Dakotan.  A pity, since the Dakota forms are quite
instructive!