Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Shelome Gooden (2003)

The Phonology and Phonetics of Jamaican Creole Reduplication

Advisor: Donald Winford and Elizabeth Hume

Download .pdf file [PDF]

Abstract:

This dissertation is an extensive treatment of the phonological and phonetic properties of Jamaican Creole (JC) reduplication. While reduplication is thought to be a typical feature of Creole languages and has been studied in the past, to date little work has been done on the phonetic or morpho-phonological properties of the process. Complementing the analysis of reduplication developed in this work, is an analysis of the prosodic system of the language. The analysis posited, treats the prosodic system of JC as a stress-based system in which lexical contrasts are signaled by differences in the alignment of the F0 contour with the word. Reduplication processes in JC are similar in form and semantics to those found in other Caribbean English Creoles. The processes are described and analysed from an Optimality Theoretic perspective. The phonological aspect focused on delimiting the constraints on the segmental properties of reduplication processes. The observation is that the JC reduplicant is a prosodic foot which copies its base completely. Further, it is shown that when the required phonological conditions cannot be satisfied, there is no reduplication. The phonetic aspect investigated how the phonological constraints onreduplication interact with the phonetic properties of reduplicated words.