Volume 59, Issue 2 - 2

Some word accentuation patterns in Singapore English are metrically opaque with abutting stressed syllables, eg. phònòlógy . Yet words like abacus are metrically transparent, cf. Singapore English abácus vs. English ábacus . I show that phònòlógy and abácus result from the interplay of two metrical derivations, one based on the English (H)σ/(σL)σ typology and the other on the (H)/(σL) typology, a Singapore English innovation. Phònòlógy carries both English ( phonólogy ) and Singapore English ( phònológy ) footings. Abácus exhibits the Singapore English footing (- bácus ) and the effect of clash avoidance as an active constraint.

The complex contact situation that developed among speakers of Niger-Congo and Indo-European languages in the Caribbean during the era of colonial plantation slav-ery gave rise to creoles with similarly complex pitch-related suprasegmental systems. In Afro-Caribbean creoles, the reinterpretation of stress in European superstrate languages in terms of the tone and stress systems that typify West African substrate languages often leads to greater complexity than that found in either the superstrate or the substrate languages. Despite this complexity, the general characteristics of tone and stress in Afro-Caribbean creoles resemble much more those found along the west coast of Africa than those found in other regions where tone systems are commonly encountered, such as East Asia and Mesoamerica. This suggests that in any scenario for the emergence of creole languages, consideration should be given to linguistic and cultural continuity from the substrates.

This paper examines stress assignment in Michif, a contact language with its roots in French and Plains Cree, and spoken by a few hundred Métis today in Canada and the United States. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, to propose a first analysis of word stress in Michif, and second, to compare Michif word stress with Plains Cree and French word stress assignment systems, to see what the linguistic effects of that language contact have been. I show that the Michif stress system derives from both the Plains Cree and French stress systems. This shows that the contact of the two source languages has had implications on the new language, but also, that the new system is distinct from either, as lexical items from both Plains Cree and French vocabularies pattern in the same way. This is evidence against the commonly held view that Michif displays a split phonology based on language source (BAKKER 1997, BAKKER & PAPEN 1997, PAPEN 2003).

Previous research on Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles (CECs) has underlined the importance of suprasegmentals in understanding the Creole lexicon. Cf. CARTER (1987); DEVONISH (1989). This study goes beyond the lexicon to give an instrumental analysis of connected utterances in Vincentian Creole (VinC). We show that in the eight pairs of segmentally identical utterances recorded, meaning is conditioned by fundamental frequency, intensity and duration. This accounts firstly, for the demarcat-ing function of these three acoustic features but more so for their role in disambiguat-ing syntactic structures. We provide phonetic evidence of how native speakers of VinC use acoustic cues to convey unambiguous messages by differentiating lexical innovations from grammatical morphemes and morphologically bound items from syntactically bound morphemes via phonetic features and intonation phrasing.

It has always been assumed that the coastal creole of Suriname, Sranan, was a completely non-tonal language. It will be suggested in this article that there is evidence that this is not a completely correct position. It appears that Sranan does have certain properties reminiscent of tone languages. Two types of phenomena exhibitng such properties are discussed here: emphatic focussing in situ, and high-pitched ideo-phones. At least ideophones require to be lexically specified as to whether they bear a High tone or not.