Stress assignment and functions of pitch in Vincentian Creole

Abstract

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.