Research Articles

The Wichita pitch phoneme: a first look

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Abstract

Wichita is a polysynthetic language currently spoken fluently by only one person, Doris Jean Lamar, who is in her mid-80s and lives in Anadarko, Oklahoma, USA. It is a North Caddoan language, closely related to Kitsai, Pawnee, and Arikara and somewhat more distantly to Caddo. Some scholars believe that Caddoan is distantly related to Iroquoian and/or Siouan. Overviews of Wichita grammar and conversation can be found in Rood (1976, 1996) and Mirzayan (2008). The polysynthetic structure of the language entails the inclusion of many bound morphemes in long words built around a verb root, with numerous complex phonological adjustments at the morpheme boundaries. This paper explores the appearance and disappearance of the pitch feature accompanying the inclusion of one verbal morpheme, the dative, trying to place the pitch patterns in the context of what we know about prosodic phenomena cross-linguistically. The conclusion is that this pitch functions exactly the way a segmental phoneme functions, and that it is not phonologically prosodic. This is a first look at the distribution and function of pitch in this language; as such, it provides an organizational framework for further study.

Keywords: Wichita, polysynthetic language, North Caddoan language, pitch, verbal morphemes, dative, segmental phonemes

How to Cite:

Rood, D., (2011) “The Wichita pitch phoneme: a first look”, Language Documentation and Description 10, 113-131. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd192