![]() Relativisation, including its process, strategies, constraints, structural patterning, meaning and interpretation, is an important syntactic structure in any language, and therefore is crucial to our understanding of the extent to which syntactic and semantic structures in NPE differ from standard varieties of English. ![]() Framed within a construction grammar theoretical framework, the article identifies and classifies five contextual scenarios showing creative movement and placement of the copula, including how structural variability (or lack thereof) distinguishes between copula dey, verbal dey and metaphoric dey.Ī comprehensive corpus-driven account of the internal structure, meaning and interpretation of relative clauses in Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) is missing in the literature. deh and de) are unrelated to the exhibition of this complex variability, though their choice of use is related to formality or text type. The article also shows that variants of dey (i.e. Contributing to this question, the study shows that copula dey exhibits complex variability, which is strongly related to the difficulty in processing the meaning and interpretation of both the verb phrase and that of the overall sentence. Previous works on copulas in NPE have rarely shown the extent to which the copula varies, the extent to which attested variation is complex, or the extent to which the simple or complex variation found is related to processing both the verb phrase in which the copula operates and the overall sentential context it scans. The present study shows variability in Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) through its frequently used copula dey. ![]() Keywords: noun phrase, Nigerian Pidgin English, variability, simplicity, complexity, syntactic function Our results, though preliminary, show that NPs in NPE exhibit considerable complexity, which is against simplification hypothesis exemplified in standard Nigerian English. The present study provides the basic description of corpus-driven structures of simple-complex NP alternation in contemporary NPE, including how factors such as syntactic function and weight explain contexts where simple or complex NPs might be realised. Works showing the extent to which structural complexity characterizes syntactic structures in contemporary Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) are underrepresented in recent studies on structural complexity, especially in creoles and pidgins.For instance no works have shown the extent to which noun phrase (NP), an important syntactic measure of variability and complexity, exhibits variability and complexity, and the extent to which pattern found converges with /diverges from similar linguistic varieties. ![]()
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