Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect

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John Benjamins Publishing, 1999 M01 1 - 329 páginas
A synchronic sociolinguistic study of Jamaican Creole (JC) as spoken in urban Kingston, this work uses variationist methods to closely investigate two key concepts of Atlantic Creole studies: the mesolect, and the creole continuum.
One major concern is to describe how linguistic variation patterns with social influences. Is there a linguistic continuum? How does it correlate with social factors? The complex organization of an urbanizing Caribbean society and the highly variable nature of mesolectal speech norms and behavior present a challenge to sociolinguistic variation theory.
The second chief aim is to elucidate the nature of mesolectal grammar. Creole studies have emphasized the structural integrity of basilectal varieties, leaving the status of intermediate mesolectal speech in doubt. How systematic is urban JC grammar? What patterns occur when basilectal creole constructions alternate with acrolectal English elements? Contextual constraints on choice of forms support a picture of the mesolect as a single grammar, variable yet internally-ordered, which has evolved a fine capacity to serve social functions.
Drawing on a year's fieldwork in a mixed-class neighborhood of the capital city, the author (a speaker of JC) describes the speech community's history, demographics, and social geography, locating speakers in terms of their social class, occupation, education, age, sex, residence, and urban orientation. The later chapters examine a recorded corpus for linguistic variables that are phono-lexical (palatal glides), phonological (consonant cluster simplification), morphological (past-tense inflection), and syntactic (pre-verbal tense and aspect marking), using quantitative methods of analysis (including Varbrul). The Jamaican urban mesolect is portrayed as a coherent system showing stratified yet regular linguistic behavior, embedded in a well-defined speech community; despite the incorporation of forms and constraints from English, it is quintessentially creole in character.
 

Contenido

CHAPTER
3
The historical context of urban creole studies
4
The use of quantitative analytical methods
19
Description of Veeton
37
Social class status and occupation
50
Field Methods and Data Analysis
65
The language attitude questionnaire and tests
79
The African substrate
93
Division of speakers into groups by overall verbinflection rate
201
Social distribution of preverbal didneva
209
Pastmarking of nonpunctual verbs for 4 speakers
215
CHAPTER 7
223
Stativity and anteriority revisited
228
Overall inflection rates by morphological category all speakers
231
Four analyses of interaction in constraints on nonsyllabic verbs
239
Inflection across the mesolect
241

Variation of KYA across the community
106
CHAPTER 5
121
Types of consonant clusters in JC
134
Principal questions and procedures for the Veeton study
139
Intersecting variable processes
152
Comparative studies of TDdeletion
162
Unity versus lectal variety across the creole continuum
165
Anterior tensemarking in Guyanese Creole basilect
180
A discourse account
181
The use of ben in Veeton
194
Inflection rates of major verb classes 4 Caribbean creoles
245
Inflection rates of major verb classes 3 English SLA varieties
252
Stativity punctuality inflection and the verb have
256
Inflection rates of have statives and nonstatives by group
258
Creole and English translation tasks
269
Social dimensions of variation in a creole continuum
284
References
297
Index of Language Varieties
321
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