The Phonological Features Of KRS-One's Song Know Thy Self

KRS-One’s song “Know Thy Self” reflects a hip-hop culture for young African-American males by enhancing their knowledge of spirituality and reality. The phonological features of “Know Thy Self” include relaxed pronunciation, and rhyme. KRS- One uses a process of simplification to succeed in a free-flowing rhythmic pattern. He omits sounds to make the verses shorter and on beat, for example, in the line “Instead of pickin’ up our women ready to mistreat ‘em, he says ‘em instead of “them” to accomplish the same amount of syllables as the next line, “You better get yourself a wife and kid and never leave ’em.” In various words ending in the present progressive –ing, the /g/ is depleted. This is evident in the line “I’m just beginnin’ to burn”

It is present in verbs like “gotta”, adjectives like “propa”, and nouns like “hoppa”. Furthermore, the rap uses end rhymes, as well as imperfect rhymes such as “illegal” with “inner-city people”. To understand KRS-One’s lyrics, it is important to have well developed metasemantic knowledge. He uses 283 different words to relate to the economic, criminal, and political reality of our society. The verse, “It’s one thing to be iced out and rocked up, but what’s the point if you’re getting locked up?” means that you can wear lots of diamonds, and get high on cocaine, but that type of lifestyle will only put you in jail. The usage of words like “seed” could imply a plant’s seed but in this context is referring to KRS-One’s figurative child. If someone is still unable to understand that words have more than one meaning, like in stage two of metalinguistic development, these lyrics would be confusing to them. KRS-One’s MLU of morphemes is 5.09, a mastery rate for Brown’s Morphological Morphemes. For that reason, morphemes are arranged in this intricate lyrical style. KRS- One’s compound sentences follow the rhetorical device asyndetic for the purpose of

The phonological differences due to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), is presumed because it is available to all African Americans who use similar grammatical and stylistic features. I was aware of the important aspects of AAVE such as specific vocabulary such as "fresh" and the use of “ain’t” as a form of negation, and auxiliary deletion. The messages he voiced expressed the problematized system of racial differences, where minorities are silenced and excluded from the cultural dialogue. A large population in fact could understand his terminology because his focus is to express more realistic, achievable goals and dreams rather than glamorize material wealth and status. On the other hand, I did not expect there to be a code-switching between Middle English and AAVE. He communicates between these two different social settings, grammatical usages, and dialect. I was also impressed with his syntactic awareness, because he did not depend on profanity to complete his verses, as many hip-hop artists do. This demonstrates his rich and competent vocabulary that allows him to express himself. “Know Thy Self” changed the way I view language development because KRS-One’s educational and inspiring rap is appropriate for children and contains multiple themes that can teach valuable lessons. It raises