For a longer, clearer version please download this pdf-file. [pdf]

My Ph.D. project revises the putative substrate lexicon in Jamaican Creole using works such as Cassidy and Le Page’s Dictionary of Jamaican English (2002 [1967]), Sibylle Mittelsdorf’s 1978 dissertation African Retentions in Jamaican Creole: A Reassessment, and Richard Allsopp’s Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (1996), among other minor works.

By drawing on a body of “best practices” in Creole linguistics and historical linguistics, the work aims to establish a sound methodology for positively assigning a lexical item to a particular substrate language based on formal and semantic grounds. This purely lexico-etymological aspect of the project relies on grammars (descriptions) and dictionaries of Niger-Congo languages. It goes beyond merely pulling “look-alike” forms from dictionaries, and seeks to provide an understanding of word-formation processes in Niger-Congo languages, linguistic interaction between languages, and how the theory on retentions/loanwords can help us make better etymological choices. This section also explores from a theoretical and descriptive angle calques, apparent grammaticalization, hybrids, and parallel polyfunctionality in Jamaican and substrate languages.

The second section of the project provides the first full scale descriptions of compounding and expressives in Jamaican Creole with a view to finding how substrate patterns of word-formation and the lexical-semantic behaviour of words might have been retained in Jamaican. The analysis in this section will be undertaken within a comparative-typological framework which helps us explore universal vs. areal typological features (patterns) within Niger-Congo and whether (and how) they provide good evidence for substrate retentions.

Work of this sort is normally forestalled by the belief that it is not possible to identify particular Niger-Congo languages since speakers of hundreds of languages were in contact. The recent work on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade by historians such as David Eltis, Paul Lovejoy etc. has helped to give us a clearer view of slaving/shipping practices and provides better figures on the trade to Jamaica than my predecessors had access to. While the results of their work will guide the current project in terms of substrate languages of focus, I will still attempt to provide a broad enough picture so as not to bias the results of my work. In the end, the linguistic and socio-historical data will be compared to see to what extent they corroborate each other.

• Morphology
• Creole Linguistics
• Lexicography and Lexicology
• Historical Linguistics
• Language Description
• Perceptual Dialectology

• Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (2002-4)
• Institute of Romance Studies (2003-4)
• International Society for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (2002- )
• Jamaica Youth Ambassadors’ Programme (2001-2)
• Linguistic Society of America (2002- )
• Modern Humanities Research Association (2003- )
• Modern Language Association (2003 - )
• Philological Society [Student Associate] (2004- )
• Poetics and Linguistics Association (2003-4)
• Society for Caribbean Linguistics (2004- )
• Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (2002- )