happy news

[Jimm GoodTracks]

Perhaps he would like to present his findings at the 2011 Sx Ca Ling. 
Confrence in June, 2011.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rankin, Robert L" <rankin at ku.edu>
To: <siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU>; <siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU>
Cc: "Armik Mirzayan" <mirzayan at me.com>
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2010 9:37 AM
Subject: RE: happy news


That's great news!!  Congratulations to Armik and to David!

I see that David's scheduled to give a Structure of Lakota course at this 
Summer's Linguistic Institute at CU also.

Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of ROOD DAVID S
Sent: Wed 12/1/2010 7:11 AM
To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
Cc: Armik Mirzayan
Subject: happy news


I am pleased to announce to everyone on this list that Armik Mirzayan just
finished his dissertation on Lakota intonation and prosody.  It's been a
long time in the works, but I am very proud of what he has done.  To me
the most interesting finding is one that clarifies a long-standing mystery
for me.  You may know that the question enclitic in Lakota is
sentence-final /he/, and that the e-ablaut form of the continuous (is
verb-ing) enclitic is also /he/, though that one is underlying /haN/.
Speakers always seem to know whether a given sentence is a continuative
declarative or a question, even though the enclitics are identical.  It
turns out that questions have a different intonation pattern at the
beginning of the sentence -- a question starts higher and often realizes
the highest pitch slightly after the first stressed syllable.  I guess I
never thought to listen to the beginning of utterance for the clue.
  Of course there's a lot more, much of which is of interest to
phoneticians and intonation specialists rather than just to Siouanists.
  The work should be available from UMI on whatever schedule they
manage.  Armik has lost his connection with this list due to some CU email
address decision, but I've included his current email in this message if
you want to write to him.
  Best wishes,
  David


David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu