Structure, Variation and Change in Creoles: Views from the P-side
When
Prof. Shelome Gooden of the University of Pittsburgh will be speaking to us this Friday, October 20. Please join us! Title/abstract, and a bio for Dr. Gooden are included below.
Structure, Variation and Change in Creoles: Views from the P-side
Discussions about Creole language structures inevitably center on questions of language transfer, variation and change and on implications for theories of language change. While theoretical musings are commonplace for grammatical properties of Creoles, discussions on lessons from the P-side (phonology, phonetics, prosody) have not happened in ernest (Clements & Gooden 2009). The gauge has not shifted much, among Creolists, nor in the wider field of linguistics. On one hand, the research of Creole language P-side (phonology, phonetics, prosody) has not advanced significantly. On the other hand, outside of Creolistics, the languages are still seen as infantile language systems, crucibles of simplicity, thus contributing little to advance linguistic theory (Gooden 2022). Using (semi) spontaneous speech data from rural varieties of Jamaican Creole, I present three cases that offer a sampling of the kinds of data that might be used to fuel exciting new avenues of inquiry to better our understanding of processes of language variation and change. These data also demonstrate that are not linguistics aberrations, but products of natural processes of speaker creativity, i.e. evidence against Creole exceptionalism (DeGraff 2005; Winford 2012; Gooden 2022).
Case 1: Some descriptions describe JC stops as pulmonic egressive ([b, [d], [g]), but some more recent works have argued that these can be pronounced as implosives ([ɓ],[ɗ], [ɠ]), or that JC has implosives stops (Devonish & Harry 2004; Harry 2006). The current analysis demonstrates there is variability in production of voiced stops influenced by factors such as place of articulation, word duration, speaking style, and discourse topic. I argue that JC speakers manipulate stop articulation in ways that may (or may not) be indicative of substrate transfer effects.
Case 2: Despite the rich history of language contact, English lexicon Creoles like JC and Trinidadian are not prosodic clones of their input languages. So, while JC, has an ip and IP above the word, (Gooden 2003, 2014), Trinidadian English Creole has an accentual phrase (AP) rather than an ip Drayton (2014). Acoustic cues to prosodic phrasing are largely unexplored and the initial evidence suggests these include duration, tone height, pitch scaling, voice quality differences. Further, in JC there is some evidence of geographical variation is tone height realization between Central and Eastern varieties.
Case 3: Focus prosody. A well documented focus strategy in Creoles is morphosyntactic marking through word order changes or focus particles (e.g. Bryne, Caskey & Winford 1993, Kouwenberg 1994, Patrick 2004, Aboh 2006, Durrelman 2007). What is less well known (and has been argued not to occur) are strategies that make use of intonation and the position and type of pitch accent. Not only are intonational strategies used, but they permit multiple foci where purely morphosyntactic strategies for focus are impossible.
Shelome Gooden is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh and is currently Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research for the Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Related Fields. She received an MA and PhD in Linguistics from the Ohio State University (2003). She has served on the advisory board for Creative Multilingualism, and for the past 16 years has served in various roles on the Executive committee of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Languages and has been a member of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics for just over 25 years. Her research focuses mainly on language contact, intonation and prosody in black language varieties in the Caribbean. Fieldwork has taken her to Belize and Jamaica and she also has worked with digitized recordings of varieties like Sranan, Trinidadian and African American English. She designed and teaches a course on Language and the Black Experience for which she has won a teaching award. Her peer-reviewed publications are a combination of journal articles, edited volumes, edited special issues of top Linguistics journals, high-profile conference proceedings and invited full- length articles to prestigious Handbooks. She has served as prepublication reviewer for 12 different peer reviewed research publications across the fields of linguistics, abstract reviewer for various national and international linguistics conferences and grant reviewer and panelist for the National Science Foundation. Most recently, she took on the role of Co-editor for Language, and is the Publications Officer for the Society of Caribbean Linguistics. Gooden’s recent publications include; In the Fisherman’s Net. Language Contact in a sociolinguistics context (in Blake & Buchstaller 2019); Intonation and Prosody in Creole Languages: An evolving ecology. Annual Review of Linguistics (2022). She was guest co-editor for a special issue of Language and Speech journal (2022); co-editor of a book for Language Sciences Press (Social and structural aspects of language contact and change, 2022).