Suprasegmental features

The most common lay reaction to Trinidadian speech world-wide is that it is ‘singsong’. Associations have been made very broadly to Welsh as well as to African tone languages (e.g. Carter 1979) and, for Trinidad specifically, some speakers’ intonation patterns have also been linked with Spanish, French creole, and Bhojpuri. The current and overall reality is a prosody which has been adapted through all these influences, and which is, at this point in time, peculiarly ‘Creole’.

Trinidadian and Tobagonian also exhibits a peculiar intonational characteristic in mesolectal speech of a rising intonation at the end of an utterance as if the speaker is in doubt or questioning (cf. Allsopp 1972). It may be that the speaker is seeking a responsiveness in the hearer as he/she does when using the very popular local tag Right?

Solomon (1993: 34) identifies pitch as the critical prosodic feature rather than stress although he admits it is difficult to abstract pitch from tone. Winer (1993: 19-20) also notes ‘a higher and wider’ pitch range than in StE and ‘less degree of fall at sentence end’. The features of pitch and stress are confounded between English and Trinidadian speakers, the former hearing Trinidad pitch as stress. Solomon (1993: 34) equates the system with the Guyanese one as described by Allsopp (1972). The result is that disyllable words are most often either high-low or low-high, the latter being the more common and older pattern; in trisyllable words it is common to find a low-low-high or high-high-low pattern. Solomon has described longer items, as characteristically either low-low-high-high or, when they break into two, as low-high-high, low-high. All this can often result in a change of the characteristic English pattern such that unstressed syllables in that variety often come to carry high pitch in Trinidadian. The most common patterns in Trinidadian overall are low-high, low-low high and low-high high, and this creates some contrasting patterns with many varieties of Standard English, e.g (Capitals indicate stress, apostrophes denote pitch) COCKroa’ch, MAChine; TRInida’d; CARpe’nte’r. Interesting contrasts may be observed between ’opponent and cha’racter, ’component and com’merce. These features of the language can cause difficulty in comprehension for speakers of other varieties and the inconsistencies are very challenging for learners of the Trinidadian variety.

James (2003) analyses the role of tone in the organization of grammatical morphemes in a number of the subsystems of TobC. Among his findings about tone are that:

a) In TobC tone is morphemic in the case of the homophones kyã ‘can’ vs. kyã ‘can’t’);

b) In TobC tone distinguishes emphatic from non-emphatic meanings in the homophones dèm vs. dém;

c) In TobC tone typically combines with rhyme length to distinguish the members of emphatic-nonemphatic pairs—high tone with long-vowel and vowel-consonant sequences, and low tone with single vowels (e.g., shíí vs. shì and dém vs dè);

d) In TobC tone is differentially associated with certain grammatical (sub)categories, with low tone associating with the definite article dì, the singularising article wàà, certain preverbal articles (e.g., imperfective à and future gò), the third person singular general object pronouns àm / òm, certain prepositions (e.g., à and pàn), and infinitival/possessive fù; and high tone associating with negators (e.g., nó and ẽ’), emphasiser dúú, interrogative / relative wé, demonstrative dà(t), certain prepositions (e.g., tón ‘according to’, gí ‘to/for’), intensifier húú, reportive sé, and certain preverbal particles (e.g., completive dón and passive gé); and

e) In TobC tone is variable on suffixes (e.g., sèf, séf) and the morpheme wan, among other morphemes, depending on where they occur in the syntax.

All in all, prosody contrasts markedly with other English varieties; the tendency to shared tonal and intonation patterns across Caribbean Creoles undoubtedly links back to the sharing of a common African tonal base despite the fact that no direct and precise links now survive.