24.499, Diss: Historical Ling/ Creole English, Jamaican: Farquharson: 'The African Lexis in Jamaican...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-499. Mon Jan 28 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.499, Diss: Historical Ling/ Creole English, Jamaican: Farquharson: 'The African Lexis in Jamaican...'

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Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:15:21
From: Joseph Farquharson [jtfarquharson at gmail.com]
Subject: The African Lexis in Jamaican: Its linguistic and sociohistorical significance

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Institution: University of the West Indies at Mona 
Program: Department of Language, Linguistics & Philosophy 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Joseph T. Farquharson

Dissertation Title: The African Lexis in Jamaican: Its linguistic and
sociohistorical significance 

Dissertation URL:  http://works.bepress.com/joseph_farquharson/1/

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics

Subject Language(s): Creole English, Jamaican (jam)


Dissertation Director(s):
Silvia Kouwenberg
Hubert Devonish
Jeff Good
Susanne Michaelis

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis presents a fresh and comprehensive treatment of the putative lexical 
Africanisms in Jamaican with a view to assessing the volume and nature of this 
aspect of the grammar of Jamaican.

The work draws on a set of best practices in the field of etymology and outlines a 
set of transparent guidelines for assigning etyma. These guidelines are put to 
work by conducting careful etymological analyses of the over 500 putative 
Africanisms that have been identified for Jamaican. The analyses produce a list 
of 289 words whose African etymologies have been fairly well established. An 
entire chapter is devoted to surveying the distribution of these 289 secure 
Africanisms based on their source languages, time of attestation, the African 
region they come from, and the semantic domains to which they belong. The 
thesis also discusses some of the regularities observed among secure 
Africanisms such as the fate of noun-class prefixes, the shape of iterative words, 
the number of taboo words, and pejoration. A reconstruction of Àkán day-names 
shows that the Jamaican system shares more in common with the 
reconstructed system than it does with any modern version of the system used 
in Africa. The final substantive chapter attempts to trace substrate patterns in 
compounding, an exercise which turns up two potential cases of substrate 
influence.

The thesis assigns fewer Àkán etymologies than most previous works, and 
proposes that many of the Àkán words in Jamaican appear to be post-formative. 
On the converse, the number of Koongo etymologies has increased. This is 
accompanied by the fact that there is more evidence for Koongo lexical 
contribution to Jamaican up to the end of the eighteenth century than for Àkán.






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