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Part of
Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes
Edited by Alexandra U. Esimaje, Ulrike Gut and Bassey E. Antia
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 88] 2019
► pp. 143–164

Chapter 1.6
Addressing a coverage gap in African Englishes

The tagged corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English

| University of Sheffield
| University of Sussex
| University of Sussex

This paper illustrates the uses of a tagged corpus of spoken Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), which has recently been finalised (Ozón et al. 2017) and made available online (Green et al. 2016). The corpus consists of 240,000 words, with mark-up and part-of-speech-tagging. Text categories and proportions of monologue/dialogue are guided by those of the ICE project (Nelson 1996), making the CPE corpus comparable with existing corpora of post-colonial Englishes. This tagged corpus offers an invaluable resource for the investigation of CPE, particularly in addressing issues of multifunctionality in pidgin or creole languages. We introduce the dataset and present case studies illustrating its potential uses, in order to highlight the usefulness of this freely accessible resource for research on African languages.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background to CPE
  • 3.Building the CPE Corpus
    • 3.1Text types
    • 3.2Audio
    • 3.3Participant metadata and research ethics
    • 3.4Spelling
    • 3.5Annotation and tagging
  • 4.Searching the CPE corpus
    • 4.1Corpus methods
    • 4.2Corpus-driven approach: Case studies
      • 4.2.1Word frequency
      • 4.2.2Lexical diversity and richness
      • 4.2.3High frequency verbs
    • 4.3Corpus-based approach: Case studies
      • 4.3.1Lexical vs. functional uses of verbs
      • 4.3.2The case of meik : Causative and deontic
      • 4.3.3Refining existing descriptions
        • 4.3.3.1Nominal plural meanings <http://apics-online.info/parameters/23#1/30/10>
        • 4.3.3.2Ditransitive constructions with ‘give’ <http://apics-online.info/parameters/60#1/30/10>
        • 4.3.3.3Instrumental expressions <http://apics-online.info/parameters/69#3/30.30/10.02>
        • 4.3.3.4‘Give’ serial verb constructions <http://apics-online.info/parameters/86#3/30.15/9.84>
      • 4.3.4Combining grammatical and speaker information: SVCs
      • 4.3.5Codeswitching
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.88.07ozo
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