Shelome Gooden, Ph.D ^{Assistant Professor}

This aspect of my research focuses primarily on synchronic descriptions of the phonology of Caribbean English lexified Creoles and secondarily on putative West-African substratum influences on these systems. My dissertation research discussed the acoustic-phonetic (F0) differences between segmentally identical reduplicated words in Jamaican Creole. I show that these are stress-based differences which allow for prosodic disambiguation of these words.  Since then my interest has turned to the prosodic typology of (Caribbean) Creoles whose prosodic systems are said in some cases to combine (putative) lexical tone and stress. I examine word level aspects of prosody in my work on the Acoustic Properties of Stress in Jamaican Creole, and phrase level aspects of prosody in work on the Intonational Phonology of Jamaican Creole. I am currently involved in a collaborative project with Kathy-Ann Drayton considering cross-Creole comparisons between Jamaican Creole and Trinidadian Creole. In a recent paper with Mary Beckman, we take the controversial view that the prosodic properties of Caribbean Creoles are not too disimilar from prosodic properties of several non-creole languages we survey.

• Read More   
  

I am also interested in the sociocultural aspects of language use in African-diaspora language varieties.  So far, I have only looked at AAVE in Pittsburgh and report on this in collaborative work with Maeve Eberhardt. The initial report appears in the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. We focus on issues related to language use as a reflection of ethnicity and local Pittsburgh identity. In a separate project I have begun to look at the prosody and intonational phonology of the variety.

• Read More

As a graduate student, I designed a funded research program to gain a better understanding of morphosyntactic variation in the tense-aspect system of English-based Creoles. I focussed on Belizean Creole as the intial data was made available to me by Don Winford and I later conducted my own fieldwork in Bermudian Landing and in Belize City, Belize (Central America). I consider theoretical and analytical issues in a narrative/discourse approach to tense-aspect while taking into account the aktionsarten of verbs. A very early version of the results appears in the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics and a more full-bodied discussion will appear later this year in English World Wide journal.