Prosody and Language contact in Creoles:  Shifting from the periphery

Prosody and intonation research in Creole languages is pivotal for understanding how prosodic system changes under language contact and diversity in prosodic systems.

Creole languages exhibit various forms of prosodic hybridity, providing rich ground for these kinds of questions. Despite their histories, Creoles are neither prosodic clones nor weakened versions of their input languages. Instead, they partly reflect crosslinguistic properties, challenging notions of creole exceptionalism, while displaying unique features (Steien & Yakpo 2020; River-Castillo 2009; Remijsen & Van Hueven 2005; Hyman & Schwegler 2008; Good 2004; Gooden 2022).

Prosodic variation manifests across and within Creoles, with differences in prosodic structure, tonal alignment, and pitch accent realization. Field recordings from rural Jamaican Creole (JC) suggest broad uniformity, yet geographical variation exists between Central and Eastern varieties. Trinidadian Creole exhibits ethnolinguistic variation (Gooden and Drayton 2017) and convergence (see eg. Armstrong et al 2022). Focus marking presents notable typological variation, indicating that intonational strategies permit multiple foci where well-documented morphosyntactic strategies fail.

This talks advocates for shifting Creoles from the periphery of linguistics research, underscoring the theoretical importance of understanding prosodic variation in contact situations. Finally, I will argue that such efforts must involve collaboration with scholars from Creole speaking communities, to comprehensively understand Creole prosody and its implications for linguistic theory.

The power of voice

Whenever we hear someone speak, we take in what they are saying and how they are saying things. Additionally, we form impressions about speakers based on their voice and speech patterns. We assess their age, gender, potential profession, and whether they are introverted or extroverted. We also infer their emotional state – are they happy, sad, excited or calm? Moreover, we consider whether they are attempting to persuade us to do something. Many of these processes do not require our overt attention and happen without much effort within milliseconds.

In my talk, I will provide a snapshot of the research we have conducted over the years to highlight the social intentions speakers reveal through the way they speak. How do our brains extract and process information from voices that communicate emotions, attitudes, and motivations? How can the way others talk to us affect our behaviours and wellbeing? I will also outline what we can learn from these effects and how they are relevant in the “real world” emphasizing the power of voice.

Motor Involvement in Language Production as Reflected in Prosodic Development

The importance of the motor system to the patterns of spoken language is especially evident when these are investigated from a developmental perspective. Speech motor skills are slowly consolidated during language acquisition beginning with first words, whose representations are also shaped with speech practice. The evolving sound shape of children’s speech through middle childhood reflects the interaction between speech motor and language development. Along these lines, the central claim of this talk is that spoken language rhythm is shaped by motor speech processes, which are guided by and coordinated with meaning. This claim will be supported with a review of study findings structured to make the following points:

(1) adult-like English rhythm develops with articulatory timing skills during the school-aged years;

(2) the coarticulatory patterns of child and adult speech suggest meaning-driven planning for execution that forms the basis for prosodic words; and

(3) hierarchical ‘performance structure’ pausing patterns emerge with the coordination of breathing and language conceptualization.

Overall, the central claim of the talk entails a motor-involved understanding of spoken language that will be discussed with reference to models of language production.

The obligatory boundary tone hypothesis and prosodic typology

Two observations about the relationship between sound patterns in the phonological grammar of a language were foundational in motivating the proposal of a prosodic hierarchy with trees defined over phonological constituents in the 1980s: (i) sets of multiple, disparate patterns---suprasegmental and segmental, the application of phonotactic restrictions and processes---cluster together over domains; (ii) the patterns are in containment relationships, whereby the distribution of (non)application of one process invariably implies the (non)application of others. However, work on prosodic and intonational phonology in the past decades has raised doubts about the universality of clustering and containment. At the same time, we argue that Autosegmental-Metrical analyses of intonational phonology have slipped into narrowing the scope of sound patterns used to motivate phonological constituents to the distribution of prosodic boundary tones. We explore the consequences of the strong hypothesis that a span of segmental material is a phonological constituent if and only if it is delimited by at least one boundary tone. We show that clustering and containment can be understood to be at least partially respected under this hypothesis. But adopting it might also lead us to miss diversity in the organization of phonological patterns of natural language.