Prosody and intonation

The BrC prosodic system’s interactive functions for turn-taking are studied by Local, Wells and Sebba (1985), who show that pitch characteristics of the final syllable of a syntactic unit help delimit turns in a way that contrasts with BrE.

Prosody and intonation are treated in depth for JamC and BrC by Sutcliffe and Figueroa (1992: 107–124), who regard them as syllable-timed tone languages with two contrastive tones, downstep and upstep. English word stress is most often associated with low tone, rather than high, resulting in English monolinguals’ perception that stress is often oddly misplaced in BrC (they mistakenly interpret high pitch as stress). Sutcliffe records several cases where British-born speakers pointed explicitly to grammatical patterns differentiated by tone for his benefit. He outlines a number of patterns contrasting question types, consecutive verb constructions, relative clauses, conditionals and indicatives by consistent devices such as marked tones on subject pronoun and main verb. There is little doubt that such elements have carried over from JamC productively, and yet it is difficult to reconcile them with more assimilated aspects of BrC phonology, suggesting that not only is further research required, but fundamental alterations in the sound system of BrC may take place in rising generations.

I thank David Sutcliffe for introducing me to the study of British Jamaican speech, and for discussion during the writing of this article; thanks also go to Michelle Straw and Pamela Knight, for allowing me to draw on their unpublished data and research, and contributing crucially to the fieldwork.