As we start the new academic year, this is the sixth in a series of
research news from your lecturers. If you’ve wondered what we get up to when
we’re not with you, this is it…
Cameroon Pidgin English: A Comprehensive Grammar, co-authored with Miriam Ayafor (Yaoundé 1) which was published by John Benjamins in late 2017. I am happy to report that the grammar has just been positively reviewed by Prof. Anthony Grant (Edge Hill) in the Journal of Linguistics, who ends his review with the comment ‘Eric Anchimbe endorses the book on the back cover. He is right to do so. This book tells us a great deal about the language, and incidentally shows us what can be extracted from a well-conducted corpus-based study and deserves to be emulated. There are many ways to write a good creole grammar, and this is one of the best.’ Writing a descriptive grammar is a labour of love, and it’s very gratifying to see that labour appreciated by a fellow linguist.
Gabriel's and my paper Information structure in a spoken corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English has just appeared in the edited
collection Information structure in lesser-described languages: studies in prosody and syntax. In this paper, we detail a method for investigating
information structure in a corpus, and argue that while elicitation methods
reveals what is possible in a language, corpus analysis reveals which forms are preferred.
Melanie Green
The 2017-18 academic year was a very exciting research
year for me and my co-authors. We have seen our joint projects come to
fruition in the form of a number of publications.
Subsequent to the release of our
pilot corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English in 2016, Miriam Ayafor (Yaoundé
1), Gabriel Ozón (Sheffield), Sarah FitzGerald (Sussex) and I published a paper introducing the corpus in World Englishes in autumn 2017.
This article reports on the construction of the corpus, which consists
of private and public dialogues and monologues, with grammatical mark-up and tagging. We discuss the extent to which this corpus can
be regarded as a component of the International Corpus of English, illustrating the relation between CPE
and standardised Nigerian and Cameroonian varieties of English by means of case studies employing ICE-NIGERIA
and the Corpus of Cameroon English.
A related project, based on data from the corpus, was
Cameroon Pidgin English: A Comprehensive Grammar, co-authored with Miriam Ayafor (Yaoundé 1) which was published by John Benjamins in late 2017. I am happy to report that the grammar has just been positively reviewed by Prof. Anthony Grant (Edge Hill) in the Journal of Linguistics, who ends his review with the comment ‘Eric Anchimbe endorses the book on the back cover. He is right to do so. This book tells us a great deal about the language, and incidentally shows us what can be extracted from a well-conducted corpus-based study and deserves to be emulated. There are many ways to write a good creole grammar, and this is one of the best.’ Writing a descriptive grammar is a labour of love, and it’s very gratifying to see that labour appreciated by a fellow linguist.
Gabriel's and my paper Information structure in a spoken corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English has just appeared in the edited
collection Information structure in lesser-described languages: studies in prosody and syntax. In this paper, we detail a method for investigating
information structure in a corpus, and argue that while elicitation methods
reveals what is possible in a language, corpus analysis reveals which forms are preferred.
Meanwhile, several projects are ongoing. I'm working with collaborators on papers on grammatical tagging in corpora and on strategies used by African
languages to signal marked clause types like constituent
interrogatives, focus constructions and relative clauses.The corpus team is also working toward building a larger corpus of CPE. The first step for that is finding funding.
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