Shelome Gooden

412-624-5922

"I am a native speaker of Jamaican Creole and according to my grandfather, a descendant of the Igbos.  I am a Creolist and Sociolinguist by trade and the main thrust of my research is the prosody of Caribbean Creoles varieties. I guess I should confess that I was a syntactician in a former life (pre graduate school), and in some sense I must have always been interested in the structure of Creole languages, because here I am now looking at higher level phonological structure in these varieties....the 'syntax' (grammatical structure) of intonational melodies.  I was first introduced to structural differences between Jamaican Creole and Standard Jamaican English by my Grade 4 primary school teacher, Eric McKenzie, who asked his class of mostly 9 yr olds to compare sentences in the 2 languages. More than 12 years later I would do a first degree in Linguistics at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Jamaica where I had the opportunity to learn from pioneers in the field of Creole Linguistics and later on complete both an MA and PhD in Linguistics at The Ohio State University."