Stress, tone, prosody, and suprasegmentals

There are many words in West Indian varieties of English that receive final stress as opposed to initial stress found in metropolitan varieties of English (an apostrophe before the syllable in question indicates final stress), e.g. rea’lize, cele’brate, ki’tchen. Sutcliffe (2003: 265) adopts the approach of Carter (1987) in her analysis of Guyanese and Jamaican Creole suprasegmentals and of Devonish (1989) in his study of Guyanese suprasegmentals. Sutcliffe defines suprasegmentals “as pitch patterns mapped onto syllables or phrases, creating intonation and tonal patterns”. He shows that English-derived Caribbean Creoles can be analyzed as having tonal systems, even if somewhat evolved in the direction of metropolitan English varieties that do not display tonal systems. By “tonal systems” Sutcliffe means those that organize the melodic pitch used by speakers into two or more pitch phonemes or tones (contrasting high and low in the case of two-tone systems). Sutcliffe focuses on Bajan, Trinidadian and Guyanese suprasegmental systems within the wider context of the Anglophone Caribbean. Sutcliffe views lexical tone, in the sense of distinguishing one word from another, as particularly developed in the Eastern Caribbean, compared with restructured English-derived varieties in the Western Caribbean and North America.

Sutcliffe suggests that basic features of the suprasegmental system indicate a link between Bajan and Guyanese in the Eastern Caribbean. Both languages display lexical minimal pairs in common, mostly disyllables, which are differentiated by pitch patterns alone: síster (with the pitch pattern / – _ /) “female sibling”, sistér (with the pitch pattern / _ – /) “a nun or sister in the religious sense”; wórker (with pitch pattern / – _ /) “one who works,” workér (with the pitch pattern / _ – /) “seamstress or needlewoman” (Sutcliffe 1982: 111). This feature has not been attested for other Caribbean creoles. Sutcliffe (2003) provides data derived from Roberts (1988: 94) for Bajan: mu=hda “mother, i.e. female parent”, mùhda= “female head of a religious order or organization”; faèada “father, male parent”, fa>ada= “priest”; bru=hda “male sibling”, bru?hda= “male member of a religious order”; fa=rma “one who farms”, fa?rma= (Fa?rme=r) surname; béeka “one who bakes”, be?eka= (Bàkér) surname. Sutcliffe (2003) also presents Guyanese data derived from Devonish (1989): práblem “problem”, pràblém “a mathematics problem”; sìngín “singing practice”, síngin “singing” (verb); wa?sha= “washing machine”, wa=sha? “one who washes”; rìidá “reader (text book)”, ríida “someone who reads.” Sutcliffe (2003) also discusses such suprasegmental features as lexical tone, downstepping, final cadence, final rise, high rise intonation, emphasis, and focus marking.