Jonah Tyler

First Name: 
Jonah
Last Name: 
Tyler
Mentor: 
Dr. Konstantia Kapetangianni
Abstract: 
The Sapir Whorf hypothesis states that the structure of the language someone speaks may alter the way they think. Sometimes a language has such a strong influence that it may affect one’s daily behavior and even modes of thought. However sometimes, thought may affect the language. Phono-semantic iconicity is the theory that the relationship between the sign, or the meaning of a word, and the signifier, how the word is spelled or pronounced, is not completely arbitrary. In English, there is a pattern involving words that have carry a meaning of something small or large consisting of high vowels and low vowels respectively. This study will examine certain words of Trinidadian Patois for patterns of phono-semantic iconicity. Firstly, a list of words will be collected and the features of the formant waves used to create the vowels contained in these words will be analyzed for their height and formant dispersion. The audio being analyzed will be from a group of native Patois speakers. When a pattern is found, if there is one to be found, it will then be compared to the patterns found in English/German phono-semantic iconicity. The research questions are as follows: Do words meaning small/weak/large/strong in Trinidadian Patois follow any specific patterns of sound iconicity? Do they follow the same patterns found in English? Do the vowels used in descriptive words elicit any ideology from native speakers of Trinidadian Patois? If they do elicit ideology, do these elicitations follow the same pattern of phono-semantic iconicity found in English? It is predicted the data will show some cases of sound iconicity, and that those cases will align themselves to the patterns found in English and German. If these patterns are found in Trinidadian Patois, a creole affected by many different languages from across the world, then it might show that some features for sound iconicity can be found across different language families, and that the field of phono-semantic iconicity is one that should be taken into more consideration.
Poster: 
Phono-Semantic Iconicity and Trinidadian Patois